From time to time one may need to delete history in certain github branch. Whenever I
find myself in such situation I use git rebase and its squash which do the
job in most of the time. However disadvantage of rebasing is you need at least
one commit. This was exactly the reason why I could not use squash this time.
Recently, we were publishing one of our private repo and we wanted to be sure that all previously hardcoded passwords/keys stay uncompromised. The solution seems to be creating a new orphaned branch with a single commit and then replacing master branch with the new one.
Create new branch called my_new_master.
git checkout --orphan my_new_master
As the branch is orphaned it doesn’t contain any previous commits thus any files. We need to add all files into it.
git add -A
Create an initial commit.
git commit -m "Initial commit"
We need to replace “old” master now which means we have to delete it at first.
git branch -D master
Rename the current branch my_new_master to master.
git branch -m master
Rewrite old remote master with the new one.
git push -f origin master