Wednesday, March 30, 2016

GIT-LFS on Bitbucket Cloud

There are a lot of posts all over the internet on GIT-LFS and bitbucket. However most of those posts mention a setting that is not available on the Cloud version of Bitbucket.

So, to give a simple answer to the question "Can I still use GIT-LFS?" ... "Yes, but.."

Why but? Well, it does come with a cost. Actually there is no build-in solution to deal with large files if your repository is hosted on the bitbucket cloud, but the GIT-LFS in general is just a concept, that can be put on every GIT service. The problem is where to put that data?

The answer is any kind of web accessible blob- or file storage. Popular answers in this case are AWS S3 and Azure, but every MongoDB or even a file system is enough (This depends a bit on how reliable it needs to be and how much you are willing to spend).

Now I guess its time to look into what GIT-LFS really is. As we said earlier it is a concept, which is not entirely true, as it is also a protocol. Actually it is able to interfere a push command (with a pre-push hook) exchange the actual file that you'd push with a "link" (an OID basically) and push that to the repository. The real file is then sent to the "lfsurl" specified in the ".git/config" file.

Unfortunately storages like the ones mentioned above are not accepting this protocol calls directly, neither git-lfs can deal with their (complex) authentication mechanisms, so you'll need some sort of interface manager, which is likely to be some sort of server.

Lately I was working on an extension to an existing solution written in Node.JS which tries to give a solution to this problem. It has the ability to talk to those storages mentioned above and implements most of the git-lfs protocol in its current version. All you need to do is putting it on a server, configure it to accept your clients and access your storage and it will work.

As it is an open source project you can contribute in any form if you like.

Golang setup PATH

Quite recently we startet in the company to use and write some Go programs. I love Go. It's easy to learn, read and modify. One of the m...