›_ Codex Issues
Codex Issues / #14324

Codex repository size increased a lot due to accidental binaries commited recently

Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened Mar 11, 2026 by hourianto Closed Mar 11, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (bolinfest, collaborator) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What issue are you seeing?

Current Codex repo is 340MiB when fully cloning it, due to accidentally commited (and then removed) binaries that are still in Git history. I hope you fix this (prune those useless binaries from the repo completely), it'll make it much more convenient to clone. Thanks!

Relevant PRs:

The main issue is that the binaries are only removed from the current tree, they're still in the git history.

Summarized by Codex itself:

===CODEXSTART===

The checkout is 471M, and .git alone is 425M. git gc --auto did not reduce it, so this is not loose-object clutter; it’s real packed history.

HEAD is small. The only tracked file over 1 MiB right now is MODULE.bazel.lock at about 1.18M. So the size problem is historical baggage, not the current tree.

Worst things in history

The main offender is a batch of checked-in platform binaries under sdk/python/src/codex_app_server/bin/*.

  • Added on 2026-03-10 in commit 6baeec68b (python-sdk: generated type foundation...)
  • Removed later the same day in 9b3332e62 (fix(python-sdk): stop checking in codex binaries...)
  • Biggest blobs:
  • sdk/python/src/codex_app_server/bin/windows-x64/codex.exe 100.6M
  • sdk/python/src/codex_app_server/bin/darwin-arm64/codex 84.9M
  • sdk/python/src/codex_app_server/bin/windows-arm64/codex.exe 84.7M
  • sdk/python/src/codex_app_server/bin/linux-x64/codex 83.1M
  • sdk/python/src/codex_app_server/bin/darwin-x64/codex 76.5M
  • sdk/python/src/codex_app_server/bin/linux-arm64/codex 71.4M

Those seven SDK runtime blobs total about 568M uncompressed and roughly 227M of the packed repo by themselves. That is the primary reason the repo is large.

Other notable historical junk:

  • codex-rs/codex historical checked-in binary: 25.3M and 18.0M
  • .github/demo.gif: 19.8M
  • reviewers/bolinfest.json: two versions around 5.8M each
  • codex-rs/tui/tests/fixtures/binary-size-log.jsonl: several versions around 2.9M to 3.5M
  • codex-rs/tui/tests/fixtures/timeout-session-log.jsonl: 2.9M
  • codex-rs/tui/src/security_report_assets/mermaid.min.js: 3.3M
  • .github/codex-cli-splash.png: 3.2M
  • .github/codex-cli-login.png: 3.1M

Bottom line

This repo is big because large binaries and media were committed into normal Git history. The worst event was the Python SDK runtime binaries added on March 10, 2026. Current files are not the issue.

===CODEXEND===

What steps can reproduce the bug?

git clone https://github.com/openai/codex downloads 341MiB for the whole repo

What is the expected behavior?

<100MiB for the whole repo, hopefully <50MiB

View original on GitHub ↗

4 Comments

bolinfest collaborator · 5 months ago

@hourianto I just updated main to exclude the PRs you referenced. The original commits are still available on https://github.com/openai/codex/tree/main-with-prs-13953-and-14232.

bolinfest collaborator · 5 months ago

https://github.com/openai/codex/commit/cc484ab0bfcd3c54fef94d4b74d0ff55e4f295dd updates the README.md on the new main-with-prs-13953-and-14232 branch to explain what happened.

bolinfest collaborator · 5 months ago

Though make sure to add --branch main --single-branch when cloning:

git clone --branch main --single-branch https://github.com/openai/codex

Currently, when using these flags, I see:

$ du -Lhs codex/.git
 83M	codex/.git

But without them, you end up with:

$ du -Lhs codex/.git
345M	codex/.git

Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a git config --global option for --single-branch at this time.

hourianto · 5 months ago

Thanks!