More on Git LFS

This is a follow up to the Git LFS Basics post – some additional notes on LFS.

Partial Clone

If the storage space is not a concern (e.g., Bitbucket's 2 GB hard limit), then partial clone and sparse checkout may replace the need for LFS. They are still in early stages, though.

Case Sensitivity

Windows file system is case insensitive, but git is case sensitive, so there may be problems when specifying the tracking pattern. According to this open issue (which was based on an older issue), you can use regex patterns, e.g., git lfs migrate import --include="*.[dD][lL][lL], *.[eE][xX][eE], [Bb]in/". Specifying it as "*.dll, *.DLL" doesn't work as expected.

LFS File Size Report

LFS has a built-in feature that will go through the history and report on the file types and sizes.

$ git lfs migrate info
migrate: Fetching remote refs: ..., done.
migrate: Sorting commits: ..., done.
migrate: Examining commits: 100% (1681/1681), done.
*.dll   5.6 GB  2013/2013 files(s)      100%
*.exe   3.6 GB    546/546 files(s)      100%
*.dat   1.9 GB        2/2 files(s)      100%
*.zip   1.7 GB      16/16 files(s)      100%
*.war   595 MB      17/17 files(s)      100%

The thing is, it defaults to showing only the top five. To show more, use the --top option, e.g., git lfs migrate info --top=100

Create .gitattributes Before or After Migrate?

Per migrate import documentation, it will create .gitattributes for you (except on certain cases based on options passed in). One thing it doesn't tell you is where it's added - it adds it to the very first commit in the history – it rewrites the very first commit (which is not surprising since rewriting history is one of the main tasks for LFS).

Find Lingering Large Files After the Migration

After migrating to LFS, if you find that the repo is still too large, you may want to run git lfs migrate info again, but it won't show any files. Instead, you can use git ls-tree to find large files in the repository. For example: git ls-tree -r -l --abbrev --full-name HEAD | sort -n -r -k 4 | head -n 10

Viewing Differences

There's no git lfs diff, and git log will show differences in "pointer" files, not the content. But in some cases, it might be useful to be able to view the differences. One way to do it is by using the external diff tool, e.g., git difftool HEAD^ HEAD Document.pdf (assuming you have difftool already configured). Note that in Bitbucket, if you browse to the source file tracked as LFS, it won't let you view the differences in the UI even if it's a "text" file, it just allows you to download the file.