Installation

git-lfs ships three ways: as native packages for the major Linux distributions, as a Homebrew tap (Linux + macOS), and as a Rust crate on crates.io. Pick the one that matches your platform.

Homebrew (Linux and macOS)

brew tap rustutils/tap
brew install rustutils/tap/git-lfs

APT (Debian and Ubuntu)

Add the signing key, register the repository, and install:

sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo curl -fsSLo /etc/apt/keyrings/rustutils.asc https://rustutils.gitlab.io/apt/rustutils.asc
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/rustutils.asc] https://rustutils.gitlab.io/apt stable main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rustutils.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install git-lfs-rs

The package is named git-lfs-rs to avoid colliding with the upstream Go git-lfs package in Debian. The binary is still called git-lfs, and installing it will replace git-lfs if you have it installed (but you can always install git-lfs to go back to it).

RPM (Fedora, RHEL, Rocky, AlmaLinux)

sudo curl -fsSLo /etc/yum.repos.d/rustutils.repo https://rustutils.gitlab.io/rpm/rustutils.repo
sudo dnf install git-lfs-rs

Same git-lfs-rs naming convention.

Cargo (any platform with a Rust toolchain)

cargo install git-lfs

This drops a git-lfs binary into ~/.cargo/bin/. Make sure that directory is on your PATH so git can find the executable when it shells out to invoke filters and hooks.

After installing

Run once per machine to register the clean, smudge, and process filters in your global git config:

git lfs install

From there on, git lfs <command> works in any repo with a .gitattributes that tracks files via LFS. Per-repository hook installation happens automatically the first time you run an LFS-aware command in a new clone, no need to re-run git lfs install per repo.

To enable Git LFS in a repository, you can tell it to track specific files. For example:

# track all PDF files in this repository
git lfs track *.pdf
# track all JPEG images in this repository
git lfs track *.jpg