GitHub

GitHub: how to reset the content of a repository

Curia Damiano

Jun 12, 2018 • 1 min read

Steps to follow in case you want to reset (i.e. empty) the content of a GitHub repository, without deleting the full repository itself:

in case you don't already have it, create a SSH key and add it to your GitHub profile:
Generating a new SSH key and adding it to the ssh-agent
in case you have tags that you want to delete as well, if you have a clone of the repository, you have to delete them locally and then push the changes to the remote:
```
git tag -d "TagToDelete"
git push --delete origin "TagToDelete"
```
if you don't have them on your local copy, you need to create them to then be able to delete them on the remote:
```
git tag "TagToDelete"
git push origin "TagToDelete"
git tag -d "TagToDelete"
git push --delete origin "TagToDelete"
```

now that your session is authenticated and authorized, you can proceed with https://gist.github.com/stephenhardy/5470814:

-- Remove the history from 
rm -rf .git

-- recreate the repos from the current content only
git init -b main
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"

-- push to the github remote repos ensuring you overwrite history
git remote add origin git@github.com:<YOUR ACCOUNT>/<YOUR REPOS>.git
git push -u --force origin main

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