BFG Repo-Cleaner is an alternative to Git's native filter-branch tool that's designed to perform branch filtering significantly faster.
The BFG Repo-Cleaner is an alternative to Git's native git filter-branch that's made for cleansing unwanted data (big files, passwords) out of Git repository history. It's designed to be faster and simpler to use, and is written in Scala.
The BFG Repo-Cleaner is even officially endorsed as an alternative in the official Git documentation for filter-branch itself:
git-filter-branch allows you to make complex shell-scripted rewrites of your Git history, but you probably don’t need this flexibility if you’re simply removing unwanted data like large files or passwords. For those operations you may want to consider The BFG Repo-Cleaner, a JVM-based alternative to git-filter-branch, typically at least 10-50x faster for those use-cases, and with quite different characteristics:
Any particular version of a file is cleaned exactly once. The BFG, unlike git-filter-branch, does not give you the opportunity to handle a file differently based on where or when it was committed within your history. This constraint gives the core performance benefit of The BFG, and is well-suited to the task of cleansing bad data - you don’t care where the bad data is, you just want it gone.
By default The BFG takes full advantage of multi-core machines, cleansing commit file-trees in parallel. git-filter-branch cleans commits sequentially (ie in a single-threaded manner), though it is possible to write filters that include their own parallellism, in the scripts executed against each commit.
The command options are much more restrictive than git-filter branch, and dedicated just to the tasks of removing unwanted data- e.g:
--strip-blobs-bigger-than 1M.
See also the git-rewrite-history tag on Stack Overflow.
