Use Git Lfs with existing Bitbucket Repository

Git LFS is a Git extension that allows users to save space by storing binary files in a different location. Git LFS stands for (large file storage) and it’s a method for saving space when working with binary files. We all know that some repositories have audio files, image files or video files which are all examples of binary files. Git does it great job by tracking changesets in test files and any changes you make to binary files are tracked as an additional copy of a file. This means if you have an image with 100 MB on your repository and if you make any change to it, git will track in new 100 MB file, which starts to add fast if you have additional changes. Furthermore, these changes get pushed to your remote repo and your remote repo starts to grow in size too. Slowing down the time it takes to clone, push, pull or perform other operations with your repo. With Git LFS your commits will point to a lightweight reference object in place of a binary file and your binaries are stored on a separate LFS server. This saves space because any time you clone this LFS repo or checkout a branch you only pull down the version of the binary file that you need from your LFS server.

Prerequisites

Installed git
Created Bitbucket account and repository

Git Command Line

Before we started with the git lfs and cloning an existing Bitbucket repository, let’s have a quick overview of the basic git command line commands. The most commonly used git commands are:

add Add file contents to the index
bisect Find the change that introduced a bug by binary search
branch List, create, or delete branches
checkout Checkout and switch to a branch
clone Clone a repository into a new directory
commit Record changes to the repository
diff Show changes between commits, the commit and working trees, etc.
fetch Download objects and refs from another repository
grep Print lines matching a pattern
init Create an empty git repository or reinitialize an existing one
log Show commit logs
merge Join two or more development histories
mv Move or rename a file, a directory, or a symlink
pull Fetch from and merge with another repository or a local branch
push Update remote refs along with associated objects
rebase Forward-port local commits to the updated upstream head

Installing Git LFS

In this tutorial, we will use Centos 7 as a host machine to install and work with git lfs. Before we install the git lfs, we need to make sure that git is already installed on your machine. To check this run:

sudo git --version

You should see the output like below:

Output: git version 1.8.3.1

If you don’t see this output, you will have to install git before you continue with the tutorial. Next, we will install the epel repo by using the following command:

sudo yum install epel-release

To install the git-lfs repo, run:

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

And finally:

sudo yum install git-lfs

That’s it, we successfully installed git-lfs.

Clone Bitbucket repo with Git LFS

Step 1. Log in to your Bitbucket account, navigate to the Repositories and open it:

Open Bibtbucket Repo

Next, we will clone that repo to our Centos 7 machine.

Step 2. Create a directory project and navigate to that directory with the following commands:

sudo mkdir ~/project
sudo cd ~/project/

Now you shoudl clone your repository to the local machine:

sudo git clone [email protected]:repo-name/project.git

If you receive the follwoing error:

Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

you need to set up SSH keys and configure it with Bitbucket.

Step 2. From your project directory initialize git lfs:

sudo git lfs install

Fetch the LFS objects for the current ref from default remote:

sudo git lfs fetch

And now download Git LFS objects for the currently checked out ref:

sudo git lfs pull

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we shown you how to use git lfs with Bitbucket repository. If you have any further questions feel free to leave a comment bellow.