BFG Repo-Cleaner by rtyley is a tool that removes large or troublesome blobs like git-filter-branch but much faster. It is written in Scala and is capable of removing Crazy Big Files, Passwords, Credentials & other Private data. The BFG is faster compared to git-filter-branch, 10 - 720x times faster, and simpler, focused on making above tasks easy. Though git-filter-branch can do things that BFG cannot. The BFG is customizable and has a simple usage with a few steps. It can strip blobs bigger than 100M, delete files, replace text in files with ***REMOVED***, delete folders or files named .git.- a reserved filename in Git. Once the cleaning is done, BFG will update commits, and all branches and tags so that they are clean, but it wont physically delete the unwanted data. The user needs to examine the repo to make sure their history has been updated, and then use the standard git gc command to strip out the unwanted dirty data. The user is advised to delete all old clones as theyll have dirty history that they dont want to risk pushing back into the newly cleaned repo.
