mikaelkaron/cherry-pick-filter

Syncs a working branch to a clean merge branch by cherry-picking commits that don't touch filtered paths. Use when syncing branches to beta/main during PR preparation, or when asked to "sync to beta", "cherry-pick to beta", or "update PR branch".

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One-time History Rewrite

Name: mikaelkaron/cherry-pick-filter
Rating: 80 (1 reviews)
Author: mikaelkaron

For a final release where filtered paths must not appear anywhere in history (e.g. removing .planning/ from main before publishing), use git filter-repo. This permanently rewrites every commit SHA — do it once, on a fresh clone, before force-pushing.

Warning: This breaks all branches and forks that share the rewritten history. Every developer must re-clone or rebase after.

Requirements

# Install git-filter-repo (one of):
pip install git-filter-repo
brew install git-filter-repo
sudo apt install git-filter-repo

# Or download directly:
curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/newren/git-filter-repo/main/git-filter-repo \
  -o /usr/local/bin/git-filter-repo && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/git-filter-repo

Process

# 1. Fresh clone — filter-repo requires it
git clone <repo-url> repo-clean
cd repo-clean

# 2. Create backup tags before rewriting
git tag backup/beta-before-filter-repo beta

# 3. Rewrite history — removes .planning/ from every commit on every branch
#    Commits that only touched .planning/ are dropped entirely
git filter-repo --path .planning/ --invert-paths

# 4. Verify — no .planning/ files should appear anywhere
git log --all --full-history -- '.planning/' | head

# 5. Force-push all clean integration branches
git push origin main beta rc pre --force-with-lease

# 6. Personal branches must be rebased onto the rewritten history
#    (all commit SHAs have changed)
git fetch origin
git checkout mikaelkaron/beta
git rebase origin/beta

Multiple filtered paths

git filter-repo --path .planning/ --path .other/ --invert-paths

Recovery

If something goes wrong, restore from the backup tag:

git checkout -b beta-restored backup/beta-before-filter-repo

references