An implementation of a git-lfs server which can be hosted locally and is designed to hold its file objects in a highly compressed form suitable for cloud storage platforms
This allows using traditional Git repository hosting services (e.g. Github, Bitbucket) without being bound by their binary file store size limits, instead storing versioned binary files on a separate service.
Git Large File Storage is a Git extension to allow versioning large binary files in Git (something traditionally Git is not well suited for). This still uses the the Git client so allows uninterrupted use of Git workflows and provides an attractive alternative to traditional, commercial binary repository management solutions (e.g. Perforce, Plastic SCM).
git-lfs does not come with a ready-to-use server, instead relying on third-party hosting services to build support into their platforms. While several such platforms support the git-lfs protocol (e.g. Github and Bitbucket), their policies (at the time of writing) restrict free repositories to 1 GB total storage (including version history) and their pricing structures for increasing the storage limit are not competitive when compared to cloud hosting services. This is problematic for individuals or small teams with large numbers of binary assets.
local-lfs aims to solve this by offering a server, trivially hosted locally, which stores the binary assets. It effectively splits the repository into a regular git repository, which can be hosted either locally or on any hosting platform, and a locally hosted binary store. This store is designed to offer very high levels of compression and be backed by (or served directly from) a cloud storage platform (e.g. Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox, Amazon S3 etc.) which typically offer larger free storage limits and much more competitive pricing structures (by several orders of magnitude) than commercial git-lfs servers. This provides all the benefits of using a standard third-party repository host (e.g. visualisation / workflow tools) without being bound by their lfs pricing model.
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All files are licensed under the MIT license.
© Copyright 2018 Jonathan Simmonds