remote rejected with deny updating a hidden ref when run git push about bfg-repo-cleaner HOT 6 OPEN

I am also facing the same issue with gitlab. I disabled the branch protection as well but still the same error.

any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks

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you can try to remove your local repo and clone it again, and the size did change to smaller. so the push should have some effect.

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same issue for me, I'm also a gitlab user.
despite the error, It seem the cleaned item have been pushed to the remote, but I'm still suspsicious about the error message.

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Same issue here as gitlab user. I disabled the branch protection as well but still the same error.

╰─λ bfg --delete-files "MAosA.zip project.git

Using repo : /home/cocoonkid/Documents/tmp/project.git

Found 2050 objects to protect
Found 6 commit-pointing refs : HEAD, refs/heads/dev, refs/heads/development, ...

Protected commits
-----------------

These are your protected commits, and so their contents will NOT be altered:

 * commit f89d2720 (protected by 'HEAD')

Cleaning
--------

Found 208 commits
Cleaning commits:       100% (208/208)
Cleaning commits completed in 92 ms.

BFG aborting: No refs to update - no dirty commits found??

The file is also still visible in the repo in the specific commit. But bfg does not even find it.

I followed the instructions to the dot.

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Same issue here when trying a dry run on a sandbox repo, please maintainer can you help on what should we do when we encounter this error ?

From my understanding this is because GitHub/GitLab still has references to the old commits in any pull requests. Even though BFG has rewritten the commits, GitHub still has read-only refs for the old commits in pull requests.

To resolve this, I found a couple options:

• Contact GitHub support and ask them to delete the pull requests for our repo. This will permanently remove the refs to the old commits.
• Live with the error messages. The push was actually successful in rewriting our repository history, but GitHub still has the old refs for pull requests. This will increase the size of our repository on GitHub slightly.
• Create a new temporary repository, push your cleaned history there, then rename the repositories. Then ask users to clone the new repository.

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Please contributors have a look at the OP of this one. This is an interessing problem worth to explain / mention in the doc and BFG's website (imho).

@rtyley @javabrett @dwijnand

Also this repo needs a bit of triage in the issue, a spammer spawned few days ago..

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