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This article will show you how to delete files from a Git repository.

Git supports a collaborative development environment. Therefore, a development team commits many files to a Git repository.

Often, we come across some files that are no longer needed or are redundant. In such cases, we deem it appropriate to delete such files or folders that have already been committed to the repository.

We will now illustrate this with an example.

git rmDelete files and folders in Git repository using

Assume that we have a folder named in a Git repository folder1. Also, consider that this folder has two files, file1and file2.

$ ls folder1/
file1  file2

To delete a file in Git repository, we need to do the following.

$ git rm <filename>

$ git commit -m "commit message"

$ git push origin branch_name

The first command removes the file from the Git repository and the file system. The subsequent commands are used to commit the changes and push the changed file deletion to the remote repository.

So, to delete file1, we would do the following in our example.

$ cd folder1

$  git rm file1
rm 'folder1/file1'

We have moved to folder1and removed from the repository and file system file1.

We can check the status of the deletion as follows.

$ git status
On branch main
Changes to be committed:
  (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)

	deleted:    file1

We will now commit this deletion as follows.

$ git commit -m "deleted file"
[main 27ec53b] deleted file
 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 folder1/file1
 
$ git push origin main

Sometimes, we may want to delete a file only from the repository and not from the file system. We may want to use the file for other purposes.

To delete the file only from the repository and not from the file system, we need to do the following.

$ git rm --cached file2

$ git commit -m "Removed file2 from repository only"

$ git push origin main

When we --cachedrun the -p command with -d option git rm, the files are removed from the repository but not from the working tree (i.e.) the file system.

Sometimes, we may need to delete an entire folder.

To do this, we need to -radd the option to git rmthe command as shown below.

$ git rm -r folder1
rm 'folder1/file2'

$ git commit -m "removed folder1"
[main dabfe02] removed folder1
 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 folder1/file2
 
$ git push origin main

So, in our example, we have now deleted the folder i.e. folder1and its contents.

For more information about git rm, please visit the following site - git rm.