How to Permanently Delete a Git file from Azure Devops

“CRAP! I Commit Pushed a database file!”

Or some other important credential file that shouldn’t be in the source control. What do I do?

Well, thanks to this stackoverflow post, we can do the following:

git filter-branch --force --index-filter \
  'git rm --cached --ignore-unmatch SOME.DB' \
  --prune-empty --tag-name-filter cat -- --all

Replace the SOME.DB with your desired file, and make sure you have correct relative path.

But what’s next? How can I commit/push? Here’s the comment for that:

git push --all --force

And then it fails due to authentication.

Well, to generate cred, go here:

There, it has Username and Password there for you to use. Problem solved!