Removing code from GitHub

Question

Is there a way to entirely remove a directory and its history from GitHub?

Answer 1

If you are asking about deleting a project from GitHub, open your project, click the "Admin" tab (or browse directly to https://github.com/username/project_name/edit) and on the bottom of the page, click "Delete This Repository". It'll ask you to confirm this, and then it's gone.

If you just want to erase a part of your repository, you need to do it to your git repository and push it to GitHub.

GitHub has written a howto about this in their FAQ. I Haven't tried this myself, so I can't guide you further, but you probably can manage this yourself here on.

In either case, this, naturally, doesn't delete any third party pulls – if someone has pulled the repository before you deleted it, it's out, without you being able to do much about it (other than trying the "pretty please"-technique).

Answer 2

This is the easiest way the deletes a directory from your GitHub repo but not local system:

git rm -r --cached FolderName
git commit -m "Removed folder from repository"
git push origin master

Answer 3

To selectively delete a file or directory (and all its associated history), you can use git filter-branch.

This is very useful when you want to completely delete files checked into the repository by mistake.

The syntax is simple:

git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm -f filename' HEAD

More info on the man page.

Answer 4

Go to the edit tab; there’s a delete link at the bottom of the page.