Using git filter-repo on Windows

Introduction

The blog post will cover the installation process of git-filter-repo on Windows, along with a detailed guide on using the tool to filter the Git history and remove the specific file you want to exclude.

We will use pip to install the git-filter-repo module.

pip install git-filter-repo

After the successfull installation, the path for your site packages will be printed in terminal.

Open this path in file explorer and copy the git_filter_repo.py file to your clipboard.

We need to paste this file into your git-core directory. To open your git-core directory in file explorer run:

start "" "$(git --exec-path)"

Now we can use git filter-repo command to remove a file from git history

git filter-repo --invert-paths --path RELATIVE_PATH_TO_YOUR_FILE

Error you may encounter

While using git filre-repo if you got an error saying python3 is not defined it's because your python directory lacks python3.exe and your python executable is likely named python.exe.

If you open the git_filter_repo.py that you copy/pasted and look the first line, you will find #!/usr/bin/env python3. This is called a shebang. It is commonly found at the beginning of a script file in Unix-like operating systems. It is instruction to the operating system, specifying which interpreter should be used to execute the script. In this case, python3 is specified as the interpreter. But as I mentioned your python directory lacks python3.exe and we need to create it.

First learn your python directry path

where python

And use this path to create python3.exe in the same directory as python.exe, run:

copy "C:\path\to\python.exe" "C:\path\to\python3.exe"