Git LFS refused to properly track my large files until it did the following:

Question

Problem

I had problems trying to use git LFS , despite numerous suggestions here about SO, in the Git and GitHub docs and on some Gists, I would run through.

My problem was this:

After completing the necessary steps:

git lfs install git lfs track "<file of interest>" git commit 

I still would not have tracked files. If I performed

 git lfs ls-files 

it will be empty. If I went ahead and performed a push, the transaction would fail, saying the files were too large. (As expected, but I was desperate.)

Answer 1

My (original poster) "Solution"

Then I discovered several fixes, some of which seem to be errors, some of which simply were not obvious to me.

• It seems that to use lfs with an existing repository, a hacking tool or a third party tool such as a BFG converter .

  • I did not want to go along this route, so I just initialized the new repository locally, and then tried to connect it to the real repo.
  • I created a new directory, then git init , etc.
    • In my case, the remote repository was GitHub. So I made all those suitable connections like git remote add origin [e-mail] :<my_id>/<my_repo>.git

• Also, while Git Training Video claims that you can simply specify a folder such as "my_folder/" , I could not get this to work. So I just cleverly used file name extensions to manage things.

  • For example, git lfs track "my_folder/" will not work for me, but git lfs track "*.zip" really worked.

• I could not correctly identify the LFS files if I did not have the .gitattributes file updated first, and it was sent and dragged this new file to the remote server .

  • git lfs track "*.zip"
  • git add .gitattributes
  • git commit -m "Updated the attributes"
  • git push
  • git add my_large_file.zip
  • git lfs ls-files
    • And here I would make sure I was tracking my_large_file.zip .
  • git commit -m "Now I am adding the large file"
  • git push

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It is possible that some of the things work, and I just did them wrong. However, after the witchcraft described above, finally, LFS was hired, so I thought I was passing this data on to others in case someone had the same problem.

Answer 2

To track all my_folder files and subdirectories via LFS, you can:

 git lfs track "my_folder/**" 

It worked for me.

The following action now does not work to track the entire my_folder directory:

 git lfs track "my_folder/" 

does not work