
You'll only need to run git lfs install once. Once git-lfs is on your path, run git lfs install to initialize Git LFS (you can skip this step if you installed Sourcetree): $ git lfs install Git LFS initialized. Install Sourcetree, a free Git GUI client that comes bundled with Git LFS. Download and install Git LFS from the project website orĬ. git-lfs packages are available for Homebrew, MacPorts, dnf, and packagecloud orī.

Install it using your favorite package manager. There are three easy ways to install Git LFS:Ī.

When you add a file to your repository, Git LFS replaces its contents with a pointer, and stores the file contents in a local Git LFS cache. During normal usage, you'll never see these pointer files as they are handled automatically by Git LFS: Git LFS does this by replacing large files in your repository with tiny pointer files. Specifically, large files are downloaded during the checkout process rather than during cloning or fetching. Git LFS (Large File Storage) is a Git extension developed by Atlassian, GitHub, and a few other open source contributors, that reduces the impact of large files in your repository by downloading the relevant versions of them lazily. For projects containing large files, particularly large files that are modified regularly, this initial clone can take a huge amount of time, as every version of every file has to be downloaded by the client. Git is a distributed version control system, meaning the entire history of the repository is transferred to the client during the cloning process.
