Removing private information from old Git commits

Question

I have a project versioned with Git that I\'d like to make open source, but it has some private information in it that is specific to the environment in which it was originally

Answer 1

I wrote a script for this a little while ago. You can find it here: https://gist.github.com/dound/76ea685c05c4a7895247457eb676fe69

(original writeup viewable from archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20160208235904/http://dound.com:80/2009/04/git-forever-remove-files-or-folders-from-history/)

The script builds on the git-filter-branch tool which comes with git. If you're curious, you can read more about removing files from a git repo here, but using the script from the link above should be easy and all you really need to accomplish removing that private information.