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Comment by belinder | Hacker News Reader

While I agree that you should rotate accidentally exposed secrets, it should be noted that you can remove old history from git reflog by expiring it

I see git reflog kinda like an OS recycle bin

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That's only client side, and you also need to "gc" it to get rid of it, or it will still be in .git/objects and can be retrieved via something like `git cat-file`.

We're getting a little off-topic, but even git-add will put it in the object store without even committing! I once saved my boss's bacon with that. He had git-added a presentation file he'd been working on to commit it, but accidentally nuked his changes with "git-reset --hard" before comitting. He mentioned his mistake in chat, and we were able to recover the lost object by sorting files in the object directory by last-modified and cat-filing it back out by that ID. He bought me a beer for that after work that day. Good times.

Read gitcore-tutorial(7), folks. You too might save someone's bacon, some day.

I also know this, because I accidentally added a huge media file and `git add .` took too long to return and then `.git` was huge lol

How do you do that once it's on Github's servers?

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That link provides instructions on how to access commits from the reflog of a GitHub repository, not how to expire or otherwise delete them.

Sounds like it happens automatically: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56020314/how-frequently-...

I think this isn't true anymore since at least the introduction of the unwanted Github activity view: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/viewing-activity-and...

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