how to reduce size of git repository

Question

I have a git repository with lots of pdf and zip files. Can git treat them as just a file name? in this case, the repo should be very small.

I have tried to add a .gitattributes with the following lines:

*.zip   binary
*.pdf   binary 

After I commit, the .git directory is still very large. Is there a way to reduce the size of my repository?

Any solution is welcome. such as recreate a new repository. The commit history is not important for me.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I use the command

git archive <branch> > file.zip

And, ... I think that your repository do not care about zip and pdf: you really need to version documents? I think the best way is to version only code. Documents should be stored in another place, like data: data are often stored in a database and database is never part of the repository.