How do I remove version tracking from a project cloned from git?

818
votes

I want to remove all version tracking from a project's directory.

What is the correct method to do this?

Can I do a shell command such as:

rm -rf .git

from my projects directory or is there a way to do this as a Git command?

I used this project to learn Git and realize I made some mistakes early on in the project with moved, renamed and deleted files. I'd like to remove all Git tracking and start fresh with git init.

11
gitgit-track
Consider git-archive. - Martin v. Löwis
Depending on how bad the mistakes were, you might actually want to do an interactive rebase of the whole thing and just squash together a ton of commits early on, but save more recent good history. - Cascabel
for windows users: rd /s /q .git - Soorena

11 Answers

807
votes

All the data Git uses for information is stored in .git/, so removing it should work just fine. Of course, make sure that your working copy is in the exact state that you want it, because everything else will be lost. .git folder is hidden so make sure you turn on the "Show hidden files, folders and disks" option.

From there, you can run git init to create a fresh repository.

492
votes

rm -rf .git should suffice. That will blow away all Git-related information.

130
votes

In addition to the steps below, you may want to also remove the .gitignore file.

  • Consider removing the .gitignore file if you want to remove any trace of Git in your project.

  • ** Consider leaving the .gitignore file if you would ever want reincorporate Git into the project.

Some frameworks may automatically produce the .gitignore file so you may want to leave it.

Linux, Mac, or Unix based operating systems

Open a terminal and navigate to the directory of your project, i.e. - cd path_to_your_project.

Run this command:

rm -rf .git*

This will remove the Git tracking and metadata from your project. If you want to keep the metadata (such as .gitignore and .gitkeep), you can delete only the tracking by running rm -rf .git.

Windows

Using the command prompt

The rmdir or rd command will not delete/remove any hidden files or folders within the directory you specify, so you should use the del command to be sure that all files are removed from the .git folder.

  1. Open the command prompt

    1. Either click Start then Run or hit the Windows key key and r at the same time.

    2. Type cmd and hit enter

  2. Navigate to the project directory, i.e. - cd path_to_your_project

  1. Run these commands

    1. del /F /S /Q /A .git

    2. rmdir .git

The first command removes all files and folder within the .git folder. The second removes the .git folder itself.

No command prompt

  1. Open the file explorer and navigate to your project

  2. Show hidden files and folders - refer to this article for a visual guide

    1. In the view menu on the toolbar, select Options

    2. In the Advanced Settings section, find Hidden files and Folders under the Files and Folders list and select Show hidden files and folders

  3. Close the options menu and you should see all hidden folders and files including the .git folder.

    Delete the .git folder Delete the .gitignore file ** (see note at the top of this answer)

74
votes

It's not a clever choice to move all .git* by hand, particularly when these .git files are hidden in sub-folders just like my condition: when I installed Skeleton Zend 2 by composer+git, there are quite a number of .git files created in folders and sub-folders.

I tried rm -rf .git on my GitHub shell, but the shell can not recognize the parameter -rf of Remove-Item.

www.montanaflynn.me introduces the following shell command to remove all .git files one time, recursively! It's really working!

find . | grep "\.git/" | xargs rm -rf
19
votes

I am working with a Linux environment. I removed all Git files and folders in a recursive way:

rm -rf .git

rm -rf .gitkeep
12
votes

The easiest way to solve this problem is to use a command line. Type this command

rm -R .git/

OR

rm -rf .git/
11
votes

In a Windows environment you can remove Git tracking from a project's directory by simply typing the below.

rd .git /S/Q
8
votes

From root folder run 

find . | grep .git

Review the matches and confirm it only contains those files you want to delete and adjust to suit. Once satisfied, run

find . | grep .git | xargs rm -rf

3
votes

Windows Command Prompt (cmd) User:

You could delete '.git' recursively inside the source project folder using a single line command. 

FOR /F "tokens=*" %G IN ('DIR /B /AD /S *.git*') DO RMDIR /S /Q "%G"
1
votes

To remove version tracking, you need to remove Git directories. For that, open terminal and enter your project file. After that, you need to remove Git directories.

Example:

enter image description here

Shortly write in terminal (-r: recursive, -f: force, star is start with .git directories):

rm -rf .git*

Result is that Git directories and version tracking removed.

enter image description here

0
votes

You can also remove all the git related stuff using one command. The .gitignore file will also be deleted with this one.

rm -rf .git*