I deleted a commit, but it is still showing in my activity report on Github?

[Caleb-Cohen]

I accidentally pushed a commit that had a date of 2012 instead of 2022, and have been trying to remove it.

I used git rebase -i and changed the commit No oddities here dated Wed Aug 8 19:48:41 2012 from pick to drop and it is no longer in my git log as seen below.

Yet after a few hours, I still see activity reported in 2012. Is it possible to delete the activity without being too drastic?

[Caleb-Cohen]

I suspected as much. Thanks for taking the time to weigh in!

[solvaholic]

I think your contribution chart is going to show all activity, including deletions.

Asking around some, I've been able to confirm if a commit is deleted from GitHub.com it should eventually disappear from contributions. The process can take time, expect hours or days.

I want to acknowledge: It can be difficult to delete a commit from GitHub. Git will prune any commits that are in the repository and are not reachable, that part's easy. When a commit is reachable, however, making it unreachable is what can be difficult - and destructive. Removing sensitive data from a repository describes the procedure.

Since we're talking about commits, here, I encourage anyone seeing this to read through Commits are snapshots, not diffs - even if you've read it before 👍

[solvaholic]

@Caleb-Cohen In case you'd like to dig further..

I used git rebase -i and changed the commit No oddities here dated Wed Aug 8 19:48:41 2012 from pick to drop and it is no longer in my git log as seen below.

When git rebase dropped commit f8dae7380f, it would have also rewritten commit 5b14d4fb05 with d27504703d as its new parent. Notice the small enough commit SHA changed to 2b5f19885d.

If rewriting history this way made commit f8dae7380f unreachable, Git garbage collection should eventually delete the commit.

Do either of those commits still exist in your local clone? or on GitHub?

You can check locally with commands like these:

git show f8dae7380f
git show 5b14d4fb05

To check on GitHub, you can use URLs like these. Use the correct owner and repository names:

https://github.com/Caleb-Cohen/REPOSITORY/commit/f8dae7380f3c945d5e5fbf79c0346d8692b1da0f
https://github.com/Caleb-Cohen/REPOSITORY/commit/5b14d4fb05e10f63e325a411c415ccdb6e41253d

[Caleb-Cohen]

Notice the small enough commit SHA changed to 2b5f19885d. I did notice that! Also looks like any newer commits, not just small enough, had their commit ID changed.

Do either of those commits still exist in your local clone? or on GitHub?

Interestingly enough, when I use the information provided it looks like both commits still exist locally and in Github though.

[solvaholic]

Interestingly enough, when I use the information provided it looks like both commits still exist locally and in Github though.

Thanks for checking that and following up, @Caleb-Cohen 👍

You can use your Git client to get an idea, in your local clone, of why those commits might still be reachable. For example, this will list any branches or tags - seen by your Git client - that contain the commit you wanted to get rid of:

git for-each-ref --contains f8dae7380f

If it's OK with you to leave this commit as-is, then I think:

🎉 Congratulations on your second first contribution! 🎉

If it's important to you that this commit be removed, please follow these instructions:
https://docs.github.com/authentication/keeping-your-account-and-data-secure/removing-sensitive-data-from-a-repository

Pay special attention to the warnings. If you encounter problems, or if you need to delete pull requests, please raise a support ticket and link to this discussion for reference.

[Caleb-Cohen]

Thank you!

I gave the delete method in your link a try and git for-each-ref --contains f8dae7380f is now returning error: malformed object which I assume is because there is nothing to find. I did try d275047 and this was the result

I think at this point I've just accepted I'll have a little green square in 2012, haha. Thank you for taking the time though! I certainly learned a bit about git & github.

[Amit1706]

May be it is that day when u had joined the github.
It is also counted as contribution to github.

[omercengiz]

@solvaholic Thanks, that helps.

Just to clarify: when you say Git will prune commits that are unreachable, does that also apply to the commit object on GitHub.com itself, so that the direct /commit/ URL eventually stops resolving?

I’m not asking about contribution history, only the underlying unreachable commit object.

[solvaholic]

@omercengiz You're welcome!

Yes, unreachable commits in Git repositories are cleaned up automatically on GitHub.com. git-scm.com says more about this kind of garbage collection:
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-gc

After that happens, the direct /commit/ URL may continue to show the commit if that commit view is still cached. This is addressed in Removing sensitive data from a repository, along with some ways a commit may remain reachable in a repository on GitHub.com.