git filter-repo is a tool for rewriting history, which includes some capabilities I have not found anywhere else. It is most similar to git filter-branch, though it fixes what I perceive to be some glaring deficiencies in that tool and brings a much different taste in usability. Also, being based on fast-export/fast-import, it is orders of magnitude faster.

filter-repo is a single-file python script, depending only on the python standard library (and execution of git commands), all of which is designed to make build/installation trivial: just copy it into your $PATH.

Table of Contents

• Why filter-repo instead of filter-branch?
• Example usage, comparing to filter-branch
• Design rationale behind filter-repo
• Usage

Background

Why filter-repo instead of filter-branch?

filter-branch has a number of problems:

• filter-branch is extremely to unusably slow (multiple orders of magnitude slower than it should be) for non-trivial repositories.

• filter-branch made a number of usability choices that are okay for small repos, but these choices sometimes conflict as more options are combined, and the overall usability often causes difficulties for users trying to work with intermediate or larger repos.

• filter-branch is missing some basic features.

The first two are intrinsic to filter-branch's design at this point and cannot be backward-compatibly fixed.

Example usage, comparing to filter-branch

Let's say that we want to extract a piece of a repository, with the intent on merging just that piece into some other bigger repo. We also want to know how much smaller this extracted repo is without the binary-blobs/ directory in it. For extraction, we want to:

• extract the history of a single directory, src/. This means that only paths under src/ remain in the repo, and any commits that only touched paths outside this directory will be removed.
• rename all files to have a new leading directory, my-module/ (e.g. so that src/foo.c becomes my-module/src/foo.c)
• rename any tags in the extracted repository to have a 'my-module-' prefix (to avoid any conflicts when we later merge this repo into something else)

Doing this with filter-repo is as simple as the following command:

  git filter-repo --path src/ --to-subdirectory-filter my-module --tag-rename '':'my-module-'

(the single quotes are unnecessary, but make it clearer to a human that we are replacing the empty string as a prefix with my-module-)

By contrast, filter-branch comes with a pile of caveats (more on that below) even once you figure out the necessary invocation(s):

  git filter-branch --tree-filter 'mkdir -p my-module && git ls-files | grep -v ^src/ | xargs git rm -f -q && ls -d * | grep -v my-module | xargs -I files mv files my-module/' --tag-name-filter 'echo "my-module-$(cat)"' --prune-empty -- --all
  git clone file://$(pwd) newcopy
  cd newcopy
  git for-each-ref --format="delete %(refname)" refs/tags/ | grep -v refs/tags/my-module- | git update-ref --stdin
  git gc --prune=now

Some might notice that the above filter-branch invocation will be really slow due to using --tree-filter; you could alternatively use the --index-filter option of filter-branch, changing the above commands to:

  git filter-branch --index-filter 'git ls-files | grep -v ^src/ | xargs git rm -q --cached; git ls-files -s | sed "s-$(printf \\t)-&my-module/-" | git update-index --index-info; git ls-files | grep -v ^my-module/ | xargs git rm -q --cached' --tag-name-filter 'echo "my-module-$(cat)"' --prune-empty -- --all
  git clone file://$(pwd) newcopy
  cd newcopy
  git for-each-ref --format="delete %(refname)" refs/tags/ | grep -v refs/tags/my-module- | git update-ref --stdin
  git gc --prune=now

However, for either filter-branch command there are a pile of caveats. First, some may be wondering why I list five commands here for filter-branch. Despite the use of --all and --tag-name-filter, and filter-branch's manpage claiming that a clone is enough to get rid of old objects, the extra steps to delete the other tags and do another gc are still required to clean out the old objects and avoid mixing new and old history before pushing somewhere. Other caveats:

• Commit messages are not rewritten; so if some of your commit messages refer to prior commits by (abbreviated) sha1, after the rewrite those messages will no refer to commits that are no longer part of the history. It would be better to rewrite those (abbreviated) sha1 references to refer to the new commit ids.
• The --prune-empty flag sometimes missing commits that should be pruned, and it will also prune commits that started empty rather than just ended empty due to filtering. For repositories that intentionally use empty commits for versioning and publishing related purposes, this can be detrimental.
• The commands above are OS-specific. GNU vs. BSD issues for sed, xargs, and other commands often trip up users; I think I failed to get most folks to use --index-filter since the only example in the filter-branch manpage that both uses it and shows how to move everything into a subdirectory is linux-specific, and it is not obvious to the reader that it has a portability issue since it silently misbehaves rather than failing loudly.
• The --index-filter version of the filter-branch command may be two to three times faster than the --tree-filter version, but both filter-branch commands are going to be multiple orders of magnitude slower than filter-repo.

Design rationale behind filter-repo (why create a new tool?)

None of the existing repository filtering tools do what I want. They're all good in their own way, but come up short for my needs. No tool provided any of the first seven traits below I wanted, and all failed to provide at least one of the last three traits as well:

1. [Starting report] Provide user an analysis of their repo to help them get started on what to prune or rename, instead of expecting them to guess or find other tools to figure it out. (Triggered, e.g. by running the first time with a special flag, such as --analyze.)

2. [Keep vs. remove] Instead of just providing a way for users to easily remove selected paths, also provide flags for users to only keep certain paths. Sure, users could workaround this by specifying to remove all paths other than the ones they want to keep, but the need to specify all paths that ever existed in any version of the repository could sometimes be quite painful. For filter-branch, using pipelines like git ls-files | grep -v ... | xargs -r git rm might be a reasonable workaround but can get unwieldy and isn't as straightforward for users; plus those commands are often operating-system specific (can you spot the GNUism in the snippet I provided?).

3. [Renaming] It should be easy to rename paths. For example, in addition to allowing one to treat some subdirectory as the root of the repository, also provide options for users to make the root of the repository just become a subdirectory. And more generally allow files and directories to be easily renamed. Provide sanity checks if renaming causes multiple files to exist at the same path. (And add special handling so that if a commit merely renamed oldname->newname, then filtering oldname->newname doesn't trigger the sanity check and die on that commit.)

4. [More intelligent safety] Writing copies of the original refs to a special namespace within the repo does not provide a user-friendly recovery mechanism. Many would struggle to recover using that. Almost everyone I've ever seen do a repository filtering operation has done so with a fresh clone, because wiping out the clone in case of error is a vastly easier recovery mechanism. Strongly encourage that workflow by detecting and bailing if we're not in a fresh clone, unless the user overrides with --force. (Allow the old filter-branch workflow if a special --store-backup flag is provided.)

5. [Auto shrink] Automatically remove old cruft and repack the repository for the user after filtering (unless overridden); this simplifies things for the user, helps avoid mixing old and new history together, and avoids problems where the multi-step process for shrinking the repo documented in the manpage doesn't actually work in some cases. (I'm looking at you, filter-branch.)

6. [Clean separation] Avoid confusing users (and prevent accidental re-pushing of old stuff) due to mixing old repo and rewritten repo together. (This is particularly a problem with filter-branch when using the --tag-name-filter option, and sometimes also an issue when only filtering a subset of branches.)

7. [Versatility] Provide the user the ability to extend the tool or even write new tools that leverage existing capabilities, and provide this extensibility in a way that (a) avoids the need to fork separate processes (which would destroy performance), (b) avoids making the user specify OS-dependent shell commands (which would prevent users from sharing commands with each other), (c) takes advantage of rich data structures (because hashes, dicts, lists, and arrays are prohibitively difficult in shell) and (d) provides reasonable string manipulation capabilities (which are sorely lacking in shell).

8. [Commit message consistency] If commit messages refer to other commits by ID (e.g. "this reverts commit 01234567890abcdef", "In commit 0013deadbeef9a..."), those commit messages should be rewritten to refer to the new commit IDs.

9. [Empty pruning] Commits which become empty due to filtering should be pruned. Note that pruning of commits which become empty can potentially cause topology changes, and there are lots of special cases. The most basic is that if the parent of a commit is pruned, the first non-pruned ancestor needs to become the new parent; if no non-pruned ancestor exists, the commit becomes a new root commit. Normally, merge commits are not removed since they are needed to preserve the graph topology, but the pruning of parents and other ancestors can ultimately result in the loss of one or more parents. If a merge commit loses enough parents to become a non-merge commit and it has no file changes, then it too can be pruned. Topology changes are also possible if the entire non-first-parent history is pruned away; rather than having that parent of the merge be rewritten to the merge base, it may (depending on whether the merge also had file changes of its own) instead make sense to just prune that parent. (We do not want to prune away a first parent being rewritten to the merge base since some projects prefer --no-ff merges, though this could be made an option.) Finally, note that we originally talked not about pruning empty commits, but about pruning commits which become empty. Some projects intentionally create empty commits for versioning or publishing reasons, and these should not be removed. Instead, only commits which become empty should be pruned. (As a special case, commits which started empty but originally had a parent and which become a root commit due to the pruning of other commits will also be considered to have "become empty".)

10. [Speed] Filtering should be reasonably fast

Usage

Run git filter-repo -h; more detailed docs will be added soon...