How to configure and use Git LFS for working with large files in a project?

The Git version control system handles text code exceptionally well, but starts to slow down when adding large binary files such as videos, archives, or heavy graphic assets. To solve this problem, the Git Large File Storage extension is used, which replaces large files with text pointers in the repository while storing the actual files on a remote server.

Installing the extension is done once for your operating system via the official website or a package manager, for example through the terminal command line. After installation, you need to activate Git LFS in the system once using a special initialization command, which registers the necessary hooks in the user's global configuration file.

To start tracking a specific type of file in a particular repository, use a command specifying a pattern, for example for video files or archives. This creates a configuration file that specifies the file types to be uploaded to isolated storage and must be added to the main repository index for collaboration by the entire team.

In your further daily work, you continue to use standard commands for staging files and pushing changes to the server. Git automatically intercepts files matching the specified patterns, sends their contents to the LFS storage, and writes only a small file with metadata and a link into the repository itself.

Other developers on the team receive these pointers when cloning the repository, and the heavy files themselves are downloaded only when necessary or by default during the full data fetch process. This approach helps keep the repository database size small and significantly speeds up cloning and branch switching operations on the project participants' computers.