react-native : can't push to git because of hprof file

Question

I would like to push my project into the github, however i just notice there is a file called java_pid14920.hprof inside the android folder and cause around 300MB

remote: error: File android/java_pid14920.hprof is 301.75 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100.00 MB

I wonder it is safe to delete this file ?

Answer 1

This sounds like a heap profiling output file, which you probably don't want in your repository at all. You'll want to delete it from the entire history and probably add an entry to .gitignore to ignore *.hprof. If the file is not in the latest commit, simply deleting it there won't make your repository pushable to GitHub; you'll have to remove the object from the entire history.

If you can easily find the commit which introduced it (try git log -- android/java_pid14920.hprof), you can do a git rm android/java_pid14920.hprof and then do git commit --fixup HASH-OF-COMMIT && GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR=true git rebase -ir --autosquash HASH-OF-COMMIT^ (note the caret) to rebase out the file.

You can also use a tool like git filter-branch or bfg to filter out large objects that you don't want.

Note that doing this will rewrite the history of any intervening commits, changing their object IDs.