Surprised by Git LFS

When I started a new job recently, I had some trouble building their iOS app. The error messages seemed to indicate that some files were missing from the repository. It took me days to realize that there was this thing called “Git LFS”.

Initially, I downloaded the zip file of the repository, unzipped it, and attempted to build it. The project wouldn’t build and files were missing. The size of that folder was about 50MB. After a couple of days of debugging, I managed to import the missing library. I thought I had figured it out.

At that point, I still hadn’t set up Git and GitHub properly. So, I set out to do just that. When I was cloning the repository (not from a zip file), I realized the actual size of that folder was about 2GB. What the heck?

As it turns out, Git LFS was used for that repository. When I downloaded the zip file, I only got the pointers to those files managed by Git LFS, not the actual files. Cloning from GitHub didn’t have that issue.

Read more about Git LFS here.