Remove Orphaned Commits From History

[Nathan McLean]

I deleted a branch that was accidentally pushed to my bitbucket repo. After deleting the branches using `git push origin --delete BRANCH_NAME`, commits from the branch still show up in the BitBucket web UI under the commit history for "all branches". I would like to clean up the history so that these commits, which are no longer part of any branch, are not displayed.

The commits no longer appear to be part of the git repository (e.g. if I try to use `git show COMMIT_HASH` I get a "bad object" error, indicating no commit exists with that hash, yet these commits still show up in the Web UI)

Is this possible to purge these commits such that they no longer appear in BitBucket?

[Nathan McLean · Accepted solution]

The branch wasn't showing up when I pulled the repo locally, but when I used "git ls-remote" I was able to see the remote branch and delete it.

[Edwin Kyalangalilwa]

Try running garbage collector 

git gc --aggressive --prune=now

[Nathan McLean]

This does not appear to be a problem in my local git repository, it only appears to be a problem in the BitBucket web UI. How would I push removal of commits to the origin repo?