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Reducing Git Repo Size

forem clones are currently 1.5G due to old vendor/cache gem's committed to the git repo. Use the steps below to reduce your clone size by 80% -- meaning faster clone , deploy , log and less disk usage

caveat: This uses a "partial clone" method which fetches a complete working tree but avoids cloning older objects from the history . See this guide and the git docs on partial clones for a more complete command and config overview.

Preferred Method for New Clones​

# do a partial clone 
$ git clone --single-branch --branch main --filter=blob:none  git@github.com:forem/forem.git

Test to Confirm the Repo Size​

# your repo will be about 300MB instead of 1500MB
$ du -sh .
280M  .

Existing Clones (for experts)​

You can clean up existing clones, but with this method you will have to rebase any changes before submitting PRs. Added work will be required.

1. Update the ref config in .git/config​

update fetch and partialCloneFilter

[remote "upstream"]
        url = git@github.com:forem/forem.git
        fetch = +refs/heads/main:refs/remotes/upstream/main
        promisor = true
        partialclonefilter = blob:none

2. Prune Old Objects Out of your Clone​

Prerequisite: git-filter-repo needs to be installed

git filter-repo --force --invert-paths --path-glob 'vendor/cache'