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Dealing with Large Files

Git plays a crucial role in managing and versioning your codebase, but it can struggle when dealing with large files or large amounts of files. This tutorial will guide you through dealing with such situations in Git.

Why Git Struggles with Large Files​

Git tracks changes to each file in a project. With large files, even small changes can make Git store the entire file again, taking up a lot of disk space and slowing down operations.

Using .gitignore​

The simplest solution to avoid tracking large files is to add them to a .gitignore file. This tells Git not to track changes for these files. Here's how you do it:

  1. Create a file in your project root and name it .gitignore.
  2. Open .gitignore and add the paths to the files or folders you want Git to ignore.
# .gitignore
largefile.txt
/large_directory
*.mp4

In the example above, largefile.txt will be ignored, as will all files in large_directory, and all .mp4 files in the project.

Using Git Large File Storage (LFS)​

If you need to track large files, consider using Git Large File Storage (LFS). Git LFS replaces large files such as audio, video, and graphics with text pointers inside Git, while storing the file contents on a remote server.

Here are the steps to use Git LFS:

  1. Install Git LFS in your system. You can download it from git-lfs.github.com.

  2. Navigate to your repository and run this command to set up Git LFS:

git lfs install
  1. To track a file with Git LFS, use the git lfs track command followed by the file name:
git lfs track "*.psd"
  1. Now, add your files to Git as usual:
git add .
git commit -m "Add design files"
git push origin master

Now, your large files will be stored in LFS.

Splitting Large Files​

Another approach to dealing with large files is to split them into smaller chunks. For text files, you could split them by chapter, section, or any other logical division. Binaries could be zipped and split using tools like zip or tar. This would, however, make them harder to work with directly in Git.

Keep in mind that while these approaches can help manage large files, Git is not really designed for this. If your project involves a lot of large files, you might want to consider using a different system for those files.

Conclusion​

Dealing with large files in Git can be tricky, but there are techniques to make it manageable. Using .gitignore, Git LFS, or splitting large files are all valid approaches, depending on your specific needs.