Installation

Requirements

• git >= 1.8.2

Installing

On all operating systems, once git-lfs is installed, git lfs install must be run. Each user that intends to use git lfs must run this command, but they only ever need to run it once. git-lfs can be disabled by running git lfs uninstall, in which case that user would have to run git lfs install again, before git-lfs features work again.

Some users may wish to only enable git-lfs on specific repositories instead of always having it on for all of the repositories. Instead of running git lfs install and enabling git-lfs for that entire user, git lfs install --local can be used instead on a per repository basis.

Note: If git-lfs is installed without --local, then git lfs uninstall --local would not disable it for a specific repository.

An additional option of --skip-smudge can be added to skip automatic downloading of objects on clone or pull. This requires a manual git lfs pull every time a new commit is checked out on your repository. This is more useful for cases where you don't always want to download/checkout every large file.

Debian

• Debian 7 Wheezy and similar needs to have the backports repo installed to get git >= 1.8.2

  • echo 'deb http://http.debian.net/debian wheezy-backports main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-main.list

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

Mac OSX

1. You may need to brew update to get all the new formulas
2. brew install git-lfs
3. git lfs install

RHEL/CentOS

1. Install git >= 1.8.2

   • Recommended method for RHEL/CentOS 5 and 7 (not 6!)

     1. Install the epel repo link (For CentOS it's just sudo yum install epel-release)
     2. sudo yum install git

   • Recommended method for RHEL/CentOS 6

     1. Install the IUS Community repo. curl -s https://setup.ius.io/ | sudo bash or here
     2. sudo yum install git2u

   • You can also build git from source and install it. If you do that, you will need to either manually download the the git-lfs rpm and install it with rpm -i --nodeps git-lfs*.rpm, or just use the Other instructions. The only other advanced way to fool yum is to create and install a fake/real git rpm to satisfy the git >= 1.8.2 requirement.

2. To install the git-lfs repo, run curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/github/git-lfs/script.rpm.sh | sudo bash from here

3. sudo yum install git-lfs

4. git lfs install

Ubuntu

• Similar to Debian 7, Ubuntu 12 and similar Wheezy versions need to have a PPA repo installed to get git >= 1.8.2

  1. sudo apt-get install software-properties-common to install add-apt-repository (or sudo apt-get install python-software-properties if you are on Ubuntu <= 12.04)
  2. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa
  3. The curl script below calls apt-get update, if you aren't using it, don't forget to call apt-get update before installing git-lfs.

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

Windows

1. Download the windows installer from here
2. Run the windows installer
3. Start a command prompt/or git for windows prompt and run git lfs install

Docker Recipes

For Debian Distros, you can use

RUN build_deps="curl" && \
    apt-get update && \
    DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends ${build_deps} ca-certificates && \
    curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/github/git-lfs/script.deb.sh | bash && \
    DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends git-lfs && \
    git lfs install && \
    DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get purge -y --auto-remove ${build_deps} && \
    rm -r /var/lib/apt/lists/*

Other

To install on any supported operating system, manually install git-lfs with no man pages.

Only one file is required for git-lfs, the git-lfs binary. i386 and x86_64 versions are available here for FreeBSD, Linux, Mac and Windows. Currently, linux arm6 must be compiled from source

1. Install git version 1.8.2 or newer
2. Download and put the git-lfs (.exe for windows) in your path, and git lfs commands start working, as long as both git and git-lfs are in your path.

Source

1. Ensure that you have a reasonably modern version of Go.
2. Obtain a copy of the repository, either with git clone (into the appropriate location within your $GOPATH), or with go get, i.e., go get github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs.
3. In your copy of the source, execute make to ensure that you are able to build a fresh copy of Git LFS. If successful, the binary will appear in bin/git-lfs.