[LinuxBender]

I have not used this in a while but here is an old function from /etc/profile.d/functions.sh on Alpine that I used to tame some unwieldy .git folders in the past. No idea if any of it has been deprecated. It's like one big monster alias. Nowadays I instead just clone a repo to a ramdisk, purge the .git folder and then rsync it to my hoarded stash of git repos.

    function gitgc()
    {
    git config --global core.compression 6
    git config --global core.loosecompression 6
    git config --global pack.compression 6
    git config --global core.autocrlf input
    git config --global alias.st status
    git config --global alias.ci commit
    git config --global alias.co checkout
    git config --global alias.br branch
    git config --global branch.autosetuprebase always
    git config --global pack.threads "2"
    git config --global pack.windowMemory "100m"
    git config --global pack.packSizeLimit "100m"
    export GIT_HTTP_MAX_REQUEST_BUFFER=100M
    git config --global ssh.postBuffer 1000000000
    git config --global http.postBuffer 1000000000
    # echo '*.zip -delta' > .gitattributes
    # echo '*.jpg -delta' >> .gitattributes
    # echo '*.bin binary -delta' >> .gitattributes
    git fsck --full --unreachable;
    git repack -a -d -F --depth=1 --window=10;
    git reflog expire --all --expire=now --expire-unreachable=now;
    git repack -a -d -F --depth=1 --window=10;
    git gc --prune=now --aggressive;
    git fsck --full --unreachable;
    }

[gcmeplz]

> Nowadays I instead just clone a repo to a ramdisk, purge the .git folder and then rsync it to my hoarded stash of git repos.

You're probably already doing this, but if you do a shallow clone (git clone --depth=1 ..) you'll limit the amount that ends up in .git that you need to purge.

Even with shallow clones, I'm still surprised that it ends up with a .git that's a decent percentage of the total. I just tried it on a repo and ended up with 16% of the total size being .git. I would have guessed that it'd be much smaller than that.

[LinuxBender]

I had also tried that but some repos still get fairly big and all I wanted was the code not the .git since I am not a proper developer. To your point they can still be quite large.

    cd /dev/shm/block && git clone -j4 --depth=1 --branch=master https://github.com/firehol/blocklist-ipsets.git

    du --max-depth 1 -hc
    24M ./ipip_country
    4.0M ./ipdeny_country
    9.6M ./ip2location_country
    6.9M ./geolite2_country
    25M ./.git
    140M .
    140M total

It's not awful but I currently keep up to date copies of about 300 git repos and if I keep all the big ones it can add up to several GB of data I do not need. For now I just clone to a ramdisk and whack the .git directory for several of the big ones before I rsync back to disk. I probably lose some interesting history doing that.