Install git-lfs on a Raspberry Pi
What is git-lfs?
Git Large File Storage is “an open source Git extension for versioning large files.” I use it on a number of our git repositories at Small Technology Foundation, including for the Site.js web site.
Why Pi?
As I announced yesterday, since version 12.8.0 of Site.js with Raspberry Pi support, I’ve started building Site.js on my Raspberry Pi 3B+. And it works perfectly, except for one thing: I can’t check the release binaries in without LFS and installing git-lfs on a Raspberry Pi wasn’t entirely straightforward.
How-to
Here’s how you can install git-lfs on your Raspberry Pi:
# Download the latest armv6l version of go (as of this writing, 1.13.3)
# You can check for the latest version here: https://golang.org/dl/
wget https://dl.google.com/go/go1.13.3.linux-armv6l.tar.gz
# Unarchive it.
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.13.3.linux-armv6l.tar.gz
# Add the binary path to your system path.
# (Add this to your .bashrc or .zshrc if you want to persist it across reboots.)
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
# Create and export your go path.
# (Again, add it to your shell configuration file if you want to persist it.)
mkdir ~/go
export GOPATH=~/go
# Download and compile git-lfs.
go get github.com/github/git-lfs
# Add the compiled binary to your path.
sudo cp ~/go/bin/git-lfs /usr/local/bin/
Test it out!
You should now be able to use git-lfs as usual. To test it out, cd into the working copy of the project you want to use git-lfs on and enter the following command:
git lfs install
If all goes well, you should see output resembling the following:
Updated git hooks.
Git LFS initialized.