We Open-Sourced Our App. Here's Everything We Had to Scrub from Git History First.

When you build something fast — nights and weekends, shipping features as you go — you don't always think carefully about what ends up in git history. Comments, scripts, environment variable values, internal references. It's all there, commit by commit, forever. When we decided to open-source swisscontract.ai , I had to go through the history with a fine-tooth comb before flipping the repo to public. Here's what we found, how we removed it, and the bonus bugs we fixed along the way. Why This Matters Git history is permanent by default. Even if you delete a file in a new commit, anyone who clones your repo can git log --all --full-history and find it. Before you open a private repo to the world, you need to know exactly what's in every commit going back to day one. What We Found (and Removed) 1. Hardcoded Vercel Project IDs An early setup script — since deleted — had hardcoded VERCEL_ORG_ID and VERCEL_PROJECT_ID values. We'd never committed the script to the main branch, but it briefly