Hey Heather, it's me again.
ProTip: don’t publish your access tokens to a public repository. I hear it’s bad
practice. It’s a pretty simple mistake to make when you’re working on a personal
project. I just thought let me just put this on github doopti dooo… ohno.
Thankfully services that provide access tokens can easily regenerate a new one.
After publishing the repo, I immediately switched it to private and though the
chances of some malicious human or bot acquiring it seemed slim, it’s best not
to take such risks lest it cost a few doubloons. However, instead of generating
a new access token, I wanted to see if there was a way to change it with
git by re-writing the history. I can’t pass up an
opportunity to potentially use interactive rebase. Who could resist that!
However, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely
within my living room I can barely make sense of what I am reading. My quick
search did yield a fruitful piece of knowledge. There’s a command git
filter-branch that let’s you remove a file in your entire history.
Basically, this post’s objective was to document that 1) git is great, and 2)
git has a way to remove a file from every commit with git filter-branch.
Because who hasn’t committed allPasswords.txt to a project they want to make
open source. Anyway, I still need to try it out to see how it works.
I did end up regenerating a new access token which I added to a configuration file. And that file was added to .gitignore. I’d still like to know if there’s a straightforward way to edit a single line in one file and have that line re-written in the entire history. I’ll leave that for another day.