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Cheat Sheet: Converting from BFG Repo Cleaner

This document is aimed at folks who are familiar with BFG Repo Cleaner and want to learn how to convert over to using filter-repo.

Table of Contents

Half-hearted conversions

You can switch most any BFG command to use filter-repo under the covers by just replacing the java -jar bfg.jar part of the command with bfg-ish.

bfg-ish is a reasonable tool, and provides a number of bug fixes and features on top of bfg, but most of my focus is naturally on filter-repo which has a number of capabilities lacking in bfg-ish.

Intention of "equivalent" commands

BFG and filter-repo have a few differences, highlighted in the Basic Differences section below, that make it hard to get commands that behave identically. Rather than focusing on matching BFG output as exactly as possible, I treat the BFG examples as idiomatic ways to solve a certain type of problem with BFG, and express how one would idiomatically solve the same problem in filter-repo. Sometimes that means the results are not identical, but they are largely the same in each case.

Basic Differences

BFG operates directly on tree objects, which have no notion of their leading path. Thus, it has no way of differentiating between 'README.md' at the toplevel versus in some subdirectory. You simply operate on the basename of files and directories. This precludes doing things like renaming files and directories or other bigger restructures. By directly operating on trees, it also runs into problems with loose vs. packed objects, loose vs. packed refs, not understanding replace refs or grafts, and not understanding the index and working tree as another data source.

With git filter-repo, you are essentially given an editing tool to operate on the fast-export serialization of a repo, which operates on filenames including their full paths from the toplevel of the repo. Directories are not separately specified, so any directory-related filtering is done by checking the leading path of each file. Further, you aren't limited to the pre-defined filtering types, python callbacks which operate on the data structures from the fast-export stream can be provided to do just about anything you want. By leveraging fast-export and fast-import, filter-repo gains automatic handling of objects and refs whether they are packed or not, automatic handling of replace refs and grafts, and future features that may appear. It also tries hard to provide a full rewrite solution, so it takes care of additional important concerns such as updating the index and working tree and running an automatic gc for the user afterwards.

The "protection" and "privacy" defaults in BFG are something I fundamentally disagreed with for a variety of reasons; see the comments at the top of the bfg-ish script if you want details. The bfg-ish script implemented these protection and privacy options since it was designed to act like BFG, but still flipped the default to the opposite of what BFG chose. I left the "protection" and "non-private" features out of filter-repo entirely. This means a number of things with filter-repo:

  • any filters you specify will also be applied to HEAD, so that you don't have a weird disconnect from your history transformations only being applied to most commits
  • [formerly OLDHASH] references are not munged into commit messages; the replace refs that filter-repo adds are a much cleaner way of looking up commits by old commit hashes.
  • Former-commit-id: footers are not added to commit messages; the replace refs that filter-repo adds are a much cleaner way of looking up commits by old commit hashes.
  • History is not littered with <filename>.REMOVED.git-id files.

BFG expects you to specify the repository to rewrite as its final argument, whereas filter-repo expects you to cd into the repo and then run filter-repo.

Cheat Sheet: Conversion of Examples from BFG

Stripping big blobs

  java -jar bfg.jar --strip-blobs-bigger-than 100M some-big-repo.git

becomes

  git filter-repo --strip-blobs-bigger-than 100M

Deleting files

  java -jar bfg.jar --delete-files id_{dsa,rsa}  my-repo.git

becomes

  git filter-repo --use-base-names --path id_dsa --path id_rsa --invert-paths

Removing sensitive content

  java -jar bfg.jar --replace-text passwords.txt my-repo.git

becomes

  git filter-repo --replace-text passwords.txt

The --replace-text was a really clever idea that the BFG came up with and I just implemented mostly as-is within filter-repo. Sadly, BFG didn't document the format of files passed to --replace text very well, but I added more detail in the filter-repo documentation.

There is one small but important difference between the two tools: if you use both "regex:" and "==>" on a single line to specify a regex search and replace, then filter-repo will use "\1", "\2", "\3", etc. for replacement strings whereas BFG used "$1", "$2", "$3", etc. The reason for this difference is simply that python used backslashes in its regex format while scala used dollar signs, and both tools wanted to just pass along the strings unmodified to the underlying language. (Since bfg-ish attempts to emulate the BFG, it accepts "$1", "$2" and so forth and translates them to "\1", "\2", etc. so that filter-repo/python will understand it.)

Removing files and folders with a certain name

  java -jar bfg.jar --delete-folders .git --delete-files .git --no-blob-protection  my-repo.git

becomes

  git filter-repo --invert-paths --path-glob '*/.git' --path .git

Yes, that glob will handle .git directories one or more directories deep; it's a git-style glob rather than a shell-style glob. Also, the --path .git was added because --path-glob '*/.git' won't match a directory named .git in the toplevel directory since it has a '/' character in the glob expression (though I would hope the repository doesn't have a tracked .git toplevel directory in its history).