NAME

       git-gc - Cleanup unnecessary files and optimize the local repository

SYNOPSIS

       git gc [--aggressive] [--auto] [--quiet] [--prune=<date> | --no-prune] [--force]

DESCRIPTION

       Runs a number of housekeeping tasks within the current repository, such as compressing file revisions (to
       reduce disk space and increase performance) and removing unreachable objects which may have been created
       from prior invocations of git add.

       Users are encouraged to run this task on a regular basis within each repository to maintain good disk
       space utilization and good operating performance.

       Some git commands may automatically run git gc; see the --auto flag below for details. If you know what
       you’re doing and all you want is to disable this behavior permanently without further considerations,
       just do:

           $ git config --global gc.auto 0

OPTIONS

       --aggressive
           Usually git gc runs very quickly while providing good disk space utilization and performance. This
           option will cause git gc to more aggressively optimize the repository at the expense of taking much
           more time. The effects of this optimization are persistent, so this option only needs to be used
           occasionally; every few hundred changesets or so.

       --auto
           With this option, git gc checks whether any housekeeping is required; if not, it exits without
           performing any work. Some git commands run git gc --auto after performing operations that could
           create many loose objects.

           Housekeeping is required if there are too many loose objects or too many packs in the repository. If
           the number of loose objects exceeds the value of the gc.auto configuration variable, then all loose
           objects are combined into a single pack using git repack -d -l. Setting the value of gc.auto to 0
           disables automatic packing of loose objects.

           If the number of packs exceeds the value of gc.autoPackLimit, then existing packs (except those
           marked with a .keep file) are consolidated into a single pack by using the -A option of git repack.
           Setting gc.autoPackLimit to 0 disables automatic consolidation of packs.

       --prune=<date>
           Prune loose objects older than date (default is 2 weeks ago, overridable by the config variable
           gc.pruneExpire). --prune=all prunes loose objects regardless of their age and increases the risk of
           corruption if another process is writing to the repository concurrently; see "NOTES" below. --prune
           is on by default.

       --no-prune
           Do not prune any loose objects.

       --quiet
           Suppress all progress reports.

       --force
           Force git gc to run even if there may be another git gc instance running on this repository.

CONFIGURATION

       The optional configuration variable gc.reflogExpire can be set to indicate how long historical entries
       within each branch’s reflog should remain available in this repository. The setting is expressed as a
       length of time, for example 90 days or 3 months. It defaults to 90 days.

       The optional configuration variable gc.reflogExpireUnreachable can be set to indicate how long historical
       reflog entries which are not part of the current branch should remain available in this repository. These
       types of entries are generally created as a result of using git commit --amend or git rebase and are the
       commits prior to the amend or rebase occurring. Since these changes are not part of the current project
       most users will want to expire them sooner. This option defaults to 30 days.

       The above two configuration variables can be given to a pattern. For example, this sets non-default
       expiry values only to remote-tracking branches:

           [gc "refs/remotes/*"]
                   reflogExpire = never
                   reflogExpireUnreachable = 3 days

       The optional configuration variable gc.rerereResolved indicates how long records of conflicted merge you
       resolved earlier are kept. This defaults to 60 days.

       The optional configuration variable gc.rerereUnresolved indicates how long records of conflicted merge
       you have not resolved are kept. This defaults to 15 days.

       The optional configuration variable gc.packRefs determines if git gc runs git pack-refs. This can be set
       to "notbare" to enable it within all non-bare repos or it can be set to a boolean value. This defaults to
       true.

       The optional configuration variable ‘gc.aggressiveWindow` controls how much time is spent optimizing the
       delta compression of the objects in the repository when the --aggressive option is specified. The larger
       the value, the more time is spent optimizing the delta compression. See the documentation for the
       --window’ option in git-repack(1) for more details. This defaults to 250.

       Similarly, the optional configuration variable gc.aggressiveDepth controls --depth option in git-
       repack(1). This defaults to 50.

       The optional configuration variable gc.pruneExpire controls how old the unreferenced loose objects have
       to be before they are pruned. The default is "2 weeks ago".

NOTES

       git gc tries very hard not to delete objects that are referenced anywhere in your repository. In
       particular, it will keep not only objects referenced by your current set of branches and tags, but also
       objects referenced by the index, remote-tracking branches, refs saved by git filter-branch in
       refs/original/, or reflogs (which may reference commits in branches that were later amended or rewound).
       If you are expecting some objects to be deleted and they aren’t, check all of those locations and decide
       whether it makes sense in your case to remove those references.

       On the other hand, when git gc runs concurrently with another process, there is a risk of it deleting an
       object that the other process is using but hasn’t created a reference to. This may just cause the other
       process to fail or may corrupt the repository if the other process later adds a reference to the deleted
       object. Git has two features that significantly mitigate this problem:

        1. Any object with modification time newer than the --prune date is kept, along with everything
           reachable from it.

        2. Most operations that add an object to the database update the modification time of the object if it
           is already present so that #1 applies.

       However, these features fall short of a complete solution, so users who run commands concurrently have to
       live with some risk of corruption (which seems to be low in practice) unless they turn off automatic
       garbage collection with git config gc.auto 0.

HOOKS

       The git gc --auto command will run the pre-auto-gc hook. See githooks(5) for more information.

SEE ALSO

       git-prune(1) git-reflog(1) git-repack(1) git-rerere(1)

GIT

       Part of the git(1) suite

Git 2.17.1                                         04/26/2023                                          GIT-GC(1)