Remove the whole history of a specific branch from git repository

Question

I would like to remove a branch from my repository and also from the history so the .git folder will get smaller. The branch was never merged to master.

I already tried to remove the branch with

git branch -D <branch name> and then to run

 git gc --prune=now --aggressive

I also tried

git reflog expire --expire=now --all

but nothing worked. the folder .git size didn't change at all and the commit didn't disappear, I could still see them with:

 git show <commit hash>

• everything i tried was in local repository.

Is there any way to do this? if so, can you write the exact way to do it?

Its also possible i did something wrong with those commands. so please write it detailed.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Radical way:

Try to clone only master branch to new repository. Fetch some necessary branches from old repository. Delete old repository, rename new to old.