Bitbucket is alarming that my Git repository is over 1 GB. Actually, in Repository details page it says it is 1.7 GB. That's crazy. I must have included large data files in the version control. My local repository is in fact 10 GB, which means that at least I have been using .gitignore successfully to some extent to exclude big files from version control.
Next, I followed the tutorial here https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BITBUCKET/Reduce+repository+size and tried to delete unused large data. The command files.git count-objects -v at the top level folder of my repo
returned the following:
count: 5149
size: 1339824
in-pack: 11352
packs: 2
size-pack: 183607
prune-packable: 0
garbage: 0
size-garbage: 0
The size-pack 183607 KB is much smaller than 1.7 GB. I was a bit perplexed.
Next I downloaded the BFG Repo Cleaner https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner and ran the command java -jar bfg-1.12.3.jar --strip-blobs-bigger-than 100M at the top level directory to remove files bigger than 100 MB from all the not latest commits. However, BFG returned the following message:
Warning : no large blobs matching criteria found in packfiles
- does the repo need to be packed?
Repeating the same for 50M resulted in the same.
Does this mean that all the files larger than 50 MB are in the latest commit? In Source code browser in Bitbucket, I looked at folders that contain large data files but those files are not included (successfully ignored).
Could anyone explain briefly what is the source of confusion about the repository size and existence of large files in the repo?
At this point you would need to look at the repository on the server to know with certainty what the problem is, and you will likely need to talk to BitBucket technical support. But your description makes it sound like your repository has some garbage in it that can be cleaned up.
Consider if you had pushed some 500 MB file up to your BitBucket repository. Now you realize your error, and remove it from your repository in some way (BFG, for example) and push that updated ref. The ref on your remote will be updated to point to the new commit, and your repository will not appear to contain the big file (if you cloned your repository, you would not get the big file).
But the remote would not have gone and deleted the old commit or the old file in that commit. It would merely disconnect it from the graph, and that large file would no longer be "reachable". It would, in fact, be "garbage" eligible for "garbage collection". This would delete the big file and your repository size on the server would shrink.
There is no way to ask the server to GC (over the git protocol). BitBucket's support should be able to perform this for you:
You'll need to look for us to trigger the gc instead. I guess the best way is to "escalate" it if it is really urgent, and we should be able to get to it immediately. — Bitbucket Support (Dec. 2016)
Note that this assumes that you actually have the full repository locally, make sure to do a fetch --all to ensure that you don't have a subset of (reachable) history locally. In case of BFG, make sure you've cloned your repository with the --mirror option.