🕵️‍♂️ How to hide Git commit history but keep contributions

hide-git-commit-history.md

Hi, I had this problem today - I had an old repository from when I was just starting to work with Git, and I needed to hide the change history because there was information in a certain commit that I didn't want to disclose.

But I have a lot of commits there, and I don't want to lose my beloved commit statistics, so how do I solve this? 🤔

To do this, we need to edit all commits in the repository and hide the changes and change commit names to [REDACTED]

Here is the script for that 👇

# Save the current commit hash to a variable so we can go back to it later
original_commit=$(git rev-parse HEAD)

# Rewrite Git history by replacing every commit's content with an empty tree
FILTER_BRANCH_SQUELCH_WARNING=1 git filter-branch \
  --index-filter 'git rm --cached -r .' \                      # Remove all files from the index (staging area)
  --commit-filter 'git commit-tree -m "[REDACTED]" "$@"' \     # Replace commit messages with "[REDACTED]" and preserve tree structure
  --tag-name-filter cat \                                      # Keep tags as-is
  -- --all                                                     # Apply to all branches and tags

# Restore the files from the original commit to the working directory
git checkout $original_commit -- .

# Add all restored files to the staging area
git add -A

# Create a new commit with all the original content, marking it as an archive
git commit -m "archive"

# Force-push the rewritten history to the remote repository (e.g. GitHub)
git push --force

📜 What does this do?

This script rewrites the entire Git history, erasing the contents of every previous commit, leaving them empty and labeled as [REDACTED]. Then, it adds all current files as a fresh single commit called archive on top of that clean history.

📂 Resulting commit structure (example):

Before:

* c3d9ab2 (HEAD -> main) Add user authentication
* b8f2ac9 Setup backend routes
* 7e0b39e Initial commit

After:

* a1b2c3d (HEAD -> main) archive        <-- Only real commit with content
* e4f5g6h [REDACTED]                    <-- Empty commit
* i7j8k9l [REDACTED]                    <-- Empty commit
* m0n1o2p [REDACTED]                    <-- Empty commit

This script rewrites your entire Git history to permanently hide all previous file changes and commit messages.
It preserves your commit statistics (author/dates/graph structure) by replacing every original commit with an empty [REDACTED] commit.

Finally, it adds a new archive commit containing your current files. The result is a clean history with preserved metadata but no sensitive content.

⚠️ Warning: This is destructive - force push required and collaborators must resync.