After months of letting our early adopters kick the tires, Git Large File Storage (Git LFS) has reached a 1.0 milestone and is now available to all repositories on GitHub.com.

Git LFS is an open source Git extension that we released in April for integrating large binary files into your Git workflow. Distributed version control systems like Git have enabled new and powerful workflows, but they haven’t always been practical for versioning large files. Git LFS solves this problem by replacing large files with text pointers inside Git, while storing the file contents on a remote server like GitHub.com.

We’re hugely appreciative of the community that’s sprung up around Git LFS. This milestone contains features and fixes that came directly from your feedback and pull requests. Some notable changes include:

  • A fully rewritten HTTP client and API specification that improves concurrency and reduces overhead when transferring thousands of files
  • New git lfs fetch and git lfs pull commands that download objects much faster than the standard Git smudge filter
  • Options for customizing what files are automatically downloaded on checkout
    • Selectively ignore a directory of large files that you don’t need for daily work
    • Download recent files from other branches
  • Improvements to git lfs push that filter the number of commits to scan for eligible LFS objects to upload. This greatly reduces the time to push new feature branches
  • A Windows installer and Linux packages for more convenient installation
  • An experimental extension system for teams that want to customize how objects are stored on the server

Git LFS is now available to all users on GitHub.com, just install the client to get started.