Rejected refs on git push

[aarnaut]

Hey,

I know a similar question has already been asked, but none of the solutions seem to work for me. I have a repository hosted on an internal company Bitbucket server and I'm trying to clean up some old binaries that take up a lot of space. I'm trying to do the following:

• git clone --mirror repo.git
• bfg --strip-blobs-bigger-than 10M repo.git
• git reflog expire --expire=now --all && git gc --prune=now --aggressive
• git push

git push fails with the following message:

remote: You are attempting to update refs that are reserved for Bitbucket's pull request functionality. Bitbucket manages these refs automatically, and they may not be updated by users.
remote: Rejected refs:
remote:         refs/pull-requests/1017/from
remote:         refs/pull-requests/1017/merge
remote:         refs/pull-requests/1021/from
remote:         refs/pull-requests/1021/merge
remote:         refs/pull-requests/1053/from
remote:         refs/pull-requests/1053/merge
remote:         refs/pull-requests/1070/from
remote:         refs/pull-requests/1079/from
remote:         refs/pull-requests/1080/from
...
remote:
To repo.git
 ! [remote rejected]       refs/pull-requests/1017/from (pre-receive hook declined)
 ! [remote rejected]       refs/pull-requests/1017/merge (pre-receive hook declined)
 ! [remote rejected]       refs/pull-requests/1021/from (pre-receive hook declined)
 ! [remote rejected]       refs/pull-requests/1021/merge (pre-receive hook declined)
 ! [remote rejected]       refs/pull-requests/1053/from (pre-receive hook declined)
 ! [remote rejected]       refs/pull-requests/1053/merge (pre-receive hook declined)
...

I've tried a couple of solutions, for example:

1. After git clone --mirror repo.git, run git show-ref | cut -d ' ' -f2 | grep 'pull-request' | xargs -r -L1 git update-ref -d and then git push after that. It fails with the same error.
2. I tried following this guide: http://christoph.ruegg.name/blog/git-howto-mirror-a-github-repository-without-pull-refs.html. After git clone --mirror repo.git, I do git config -e, update the fetch config and finish off with git remote update and git push. This doesn't seem to do anything. I just end up getting the same error after running bfg. I'm not sure if this is expected, but my refs folder doesn't contain a pull-requests folder until I run bfg.

[javabrett]

1. PRs will always reference un-rewritten history and trees, which will contain the old bulk.
2. Bitbucket assumes that hidden PR refs should be read only.

You need to find a way to either override that fire Bitbucket, or delete the PRs and their refs, or push your cleaned repo to a fresh project, discarding the PRs.

[aarnaut]

I decided to do a push all refs except for PR, like this git push --force refs/head/* and git push --force refs/tags/*. This turned out fine.

[johnpankowicz]

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the solution by @aarnaut just hides the problem.

• The pull-request refs are still not updated.
• Any files that you are trying to remove from git history will still be there in the unchanged pull-requests.
• People doing a simple clone of your repo will not get the deleted files. But anyone doing a mirror clone WILL get those files.
• If you are trying to remove sensitive secrets, they will still be there for anyone to see.

Question: Will (or could) these pull-requests eventually be removed by Github?

I experimented with a small test repo I added a file, "ngfile.txt", removed it and ran BFG to remove it from the history. I can still see the contents of the file when I look at the PR. But the PR info also telling me: "This commit does not belong to any branch on this repository, and may belong to a fork outside of the repository." See PR info

Does this mean that the commit for the PR may eventually be removed during clean up?