How to use git-lfs on ubuntu

This article introduces the installation and use of git-lfs tool on the linux platform.

The purpose of Git Large File Storage (LFS) is to better integrate large binary files, such as audio files, datasets, images and videos, into Git workflows. We know that Git is not efficient at storing binaries because it compresses and stores all full versions of binaries, which is not optimal as versions grow and binaries become more numerous. And the way LFS handles large binary files is by replacing them with text pointers, which are actually text files containing binary file information. The text pointers are stored in Git, while the large files themselves are hosted on the Git LFS server via HTTPS.

Installation

Install git-lfs the easy way, just use the apt package management system。

curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/github/git-lfs/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt-get install git-lfs

Verify the installation was successful.

git lfs

If the installation is successful, the above command will output the instructions for using git-lfs.

Track files

Change to your project repository directory.

Following command enables git-lfs in your project.

git lfs install

Following command make git-lfs track all “.so” file in your project.

git lfs track *.so

Tracked files will be logged to “.gitattributes”, you can also edit it to add or remove tracked files.

vi .gitattributes

Commit

This step is the same as usual.

git add .
git commit -m "commit notes"
git push

View tracked files

Following command shows files that tracked by git-lfs.

git lfs ls-files