How to Remove Secrets from Git History

You have a password or some secret in your Git repository, and you want to remove it. I recently had the same problem in one of my repositories. I will show you a convenient and simple way to get rid of any accidentally committed secret in your Git repository.

Today, I will show you a simple but effective way to get rid of secrets in your Git repository.

We committed a secret into a Git repository. The secret will always remain in the Git history.

While there are native Git commands like git filter-branch that we can use to rewrite the Git history, it still is somewhat error-prone. It is especially true if you haven't used those commands before.

Luckily, I came across BFG Repo Cleaner.

00:00 Introduction
00:35 The Problem
01:29 Possible Solutions
01:51 BFG Repo Cleaner
02:22 Removing Secrets
03:55 Exposed Secrets

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CREDITS
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[ClaudioBernasconi]

Do you have any other tips and tricks for using Git?

[Trapson]

I really needed this. Worked flawlessly, thank you

[timweiss]

Great tip. I didn't want the default ***REMOVED*** as the text replacement so I used in my .TXT file :

OLDTEXT==>NEWTEXT

and the NEWTEXT was now in all files and history!!

[danilovieirarocha]

great video friend, it helped me a lot

greetings from Brazil

[HernaniSamuel]

I forgot to add the .env in gitignore and all my credentials went to the local and remote repository... At least there's only me in the project and the remote repository is private 😅

[sleslie]

brilliant video - really helped thanks

[AdityaYada]

what about merged pull requests ? can we clean that too?

[harishkumarkr]

Nice,
Can we remove the secret key from specific branch ?

[dioxino]

I prefer not using another tool with my passwords: the less tools are used to manage them, the more secured will be my passwords.

[RebelionDNA]

I used the same method as you described, but it replaced every text of the file with ***REMOVED***, I'm not sure how to make it so it will replace only the specific word with ***REMOVED***. How can i achieve that?

[paulhere]

Hello, What's the UI you are using in this video? Thanks

[varun_]

I was able to see my changes in github desktop but, it's not moving into github repo, any idea on this?

[Fangh]

do you have a video to do the same but for a file ? like a png ? to remove it entierly ?