Normally commands like git annex add
always add files to the annex.
And when using the v6 repository mode, even git add
and git commit -a
will add files to the annex.
Let's suppose you're developing a video game, written in C. You have source code, and some large game assets. You want to ensure the source code is stored in git -- that's what git's for! And you want to store the game assets in the git annex -- to avod bloating your git repos with possibly enormous files, but still version control them.
The annex.largefiles configuration is useful for such mixed content
repositories. It's checked by git annex add
, by git add
and git commit -a
(in v6 repositories), by git annex import
and the assistant. It's
also used by git annex addurl
and git annex importfeed
when downloading
files. When a file does not match annex.largefiles, these commands will
add its content to git instead of to the annex.
This saves you the bother of keeping things straight when adding files.
examples
For example, let's make only files larger than 100 kb be added to the annex,
and never *.c
and *.h
source code files.
Write this to the .gitattributes
file:
* annex.largefiles=(largerthan=100kb)
*.c annex.largefiles=nothing
*.h annex.largefiles=nothing
Or, set the git configuration instead:
git config annex.largefiles 'largerthan=100kb and not (include=*.c or include=*.h)'
Both of these settings do the same thing. Setting it in the .gitattributes
file makes any checkout of the repository share that configuration, so is often
a good choice. Setting the annex.largefiles git configuration lets different
checkouts behave differently. The git configuration overrides the
.gitattributes
configuration.
syntax
The value of annex.largefiles is similar to a preferred content expression. The following terms can be used in annex.largefiles:
include=glob
/exclude=glob
Specify files to include or exclude.
The glob can contain
*
and?
to match arbitrary characters.smallerthan=size
/largerthan=size
Matches only files smaller than, or larger than the specified size.
The size can be specified with any commonly used units, for example, "0.5 gb" or "100 KiloBytes"
mimetype=glob
Looks up the MIME type of a file, and checks if the glob matches it.
For example, "mimetype=text/*" will match many varieties of text files, including "text/plain", but also "text/x-shellscript", "text/x-makefile", etc.
The MIME types are the same that are displayed by running
file --mime-type
This is only available to use when git-annex was built with the MagicMime build flag.
anything
Matches any file.
nothing
Matches no files. (Same as "not anything")
not expression
Inverts what the expression matches.
and
/or
/( expression )
These can be used to build up more complicated expressions.
The way the .gitattributes
example above works is, *.c
and *.h
files
have the annex.largefiles attribute set to "nothing",
and so those files are never treated as large files. All other files use
the other value, which checks the file size.
Note that, since git attribute values cannot contain whitespace, it's useful to instead parenthesize the terms of the annex.largefiles attribute. This trick allows for more complicated expressions. For example, this is the same as the git config shown earlier, shoehorned into a git attribute:
* annex.largefiles=(largerthan=100kb)and(not((include=*.c)or(include=*.h)))
temporarily override
If you've set up an annex.largefiles configuration but want to force a file to be stored in the annex, you can temporarily override the configuration like this:
git annex add -c annex.largefiles=anything smallfile
I use version 5.20140412, and I've tried the annex.largefiles in .gitattributes, but doesn't work. Every file is added to .git/annex/objects, including the ones that are excluded in .gitattributes.
I've just started using git-annex so maybe I'm doing something wrong...
I have the same problem: the annex.largefiles is ignored by "git add" when set in .gitattributes allthouch git check-attr does list it.
but it works when set with git config annex.largefiles
git annex version 6.20160126
The first version to support largefiles in .gitattributes was 6.20160211, so both the above commenters just have too old a version.