How do you remove commit history in GitHub

Background

In some circumstances it will make sense to remove commit history from a GitHub repo. On public repositories you might want to do this if you have previously had a private repo, but you don’t wish the public to see history of the code.

Steps to Remove Commit History from GitHub

Here are the steps for removing the commit history:

1. Checkoutgit checkout --orphan latest_branch
2. Add all the filesgit add -A
3. Commit the changesgit commit -am "commit message"
4. Delete the branchgit branch -D master
5. Rename the current branch to mastergit branch -m master
6. Finally, force update your repositorygit push -f origin master

Warning: Your commit history is now history.

References

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13716658/how-to-delete-all-commit-history-in-github
• man git-add