git filter-branch 从我的仓库中删除所有子模块

Question

Hello I have successfully rewrote history and got the 5 folders I wanted to extract using git filter-branch -f --prune-empty --tree-filter 'rm -rf <all unwanted dirs>' and kept all git history.

The only remaining issue are submodules, I sill have commits doing

Subproject commit <hash>

and I want to completely remove ALL of those submodule commits from my git history, how can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

I have done it with

git filter-branch -f --prune-empty --tree-filter '
    git submodule deinit -f .
    git rm -rf lib && rm -rf lib
    find . -name .gitmodules -delete' HEAD

Assuming that all of my submodules were located in lib directory

Answer 2

The other solution did not work for me. Following the top voted answer on how to remove submodules , I used the following command, which is more flexible, as you can specify submodules in multiple folders:

git filter-branch -f --prune-empty --tree-filter '
    for SUBMODULE_DIR in submodule-dir-1 lib/submodule-dir-2 lib/submodule-dir-3
    do
        if [ -d $SUBMODULE_DIR ]; then
            git submodule deinit -f $SUBMODULE_DIR
            git rm -rf .git/modules/$SUBMODULE_DIR
            git rm -f $SUBMODULE_DIR
        fi
    done
    git rm -f --ignore-unmatch .gitmodules' HEAD

Effectively we are checking the list of submodule folders for each commit. If the submodule folder exists, we completely remove the submodule. Technically that alone is sufficient, be we also want to get rid of the .gitmodules file. If you only want to delete specific submodules, that line might need some additional work.