Unstage a file in previous commits in git

Question

We use git together with our iOS app, and we're now planning to make the app's code open source. The problem is we don't want people to have access to our API keys because the API itself shouldn't be accessible by the public.

The API keys are all in APIConstants.h and .m. I'm thinking of unstaging them in future commits, but I understand that people can still check out older commits. Is there any way I can disable the checking out of those two files even from older commits?

The other solution I can think of is deleting the .git folder altogether, add APIConstants to the .gitignore, and doing git init again at the expense of deleting all of our commit history.

possible duplicate of [Remove sensitive files and their commits from Git history](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/872565/remove-sensitive-files-and-their-commits-from-git-history) — see in particular the answer using BFG; I heard a lot of people have had success with that — torek, Mar 03 '14 at 04:46

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 03 '14 at 03:17

1

I think you can accomplish this by running the following command: git rm --cached file

and then adding the file to your .gitignore file so it's not added again later.

answered Mar 03 '14 at 03:17

Michael Droz

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 03 '14 at 03:37

1

Do it like this:

$ git rm --cached APIConstants.h
$ echo APIConstants.h >> .gitignore
$ git add .gitignore
$ git commit -m "Remove and ignore APIConstants.h"

answered Mar 03 '14 at 03:37

Agis

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 03 '14 at 04:09

adding the file to .gitignore will guarantee that the file won't be included in the future commits.

However, as you said, it is already available and users can still download the old file. You could remove them from the repository altogether..

git rm --cached <file>

Or, if you want to tell the repository to stop tracking a file, you could use..

git update-index --assume-unchanged <file>

and this can be reverted by using,

git update-index --no-assume-unchanged <file>

Unstage a file in previous commits in git

3 Answers3