rtyley/bfg-repo-cleaner

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

12175 stars · 584 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

BFG Repo-Cleaner is a command-line tool for removing large files, passwords, credentials, and other unwanted data from Git repository history. It is a simpler and much faster alternative to git-filter-branch, written in Scala and run on the JVM.

Use cases

• remove large files from git history
• strip passwords and credentials from a git repository
• cleanse private data out of git commits
• shrink a bloated git repository
• replace sensitive text across all git history
• alternative to git-filter-branch for history rewriting

When to choose

• you need to delete big blobs or secrets from an entire Git repo's history quickly
• you want a simple, focused alternative to git-filter-branch
• you have a large repository where filter-branch is too slow

When to avoid

• you need highly custom, arbitrary history rewriting beyond blob removal and text replacement
• you only want to remove files from future commits without touching history
• you cannot run Java on your machine

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

developer-tools version-control security developer-tools version-control security cli jvm cross-platform git git-history-rewriting repo-cleaning secrets-removal scala java

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="rtyley/bfg-repo-cleaner")