Does GitLab support large files via git-annex or otherwise?

Question

I run a GitLab instance and would like to allow my users to upload files of almost any size.

It is well-known that git still has problems with large files. I am aware of approaches to circumvent this issue by storing the files somewhere else and versioning just the metadata, e.g. git-annex, git-media and git-fat. Are any of these integrated into GitLab, or would it be easy to do so?

Grays

Answer 1

As of February 18 2015 git-annex is supported on GitLab 7.8 Enterprise Edition

Greening

This is excellent news. Any chance this will be available in the community edition eventually? – Grays

The second comment in the above link says "currently have no plans to port this to CE." – Greening

GitLab CEO here, thanks for adding this answer, indeed currently no plans to port this to CE. – Settles

Answer 2

This is discussed and open for consideration in this issue

git-annex can manage links afaik.
But it won't allow me to actually store or distribute any files.

GitLab team ADMIN GitLab team (Admin, Gitlab) commented · October 07, 2013 16:51
Consider looking into git-annex

But this isn't implemented yet.

Before 5.0, GitLab was using gitolite as an authorization layer (replaced since by gitlab-shell).
And incidentally, gitolite just integrated git-annex support (commit b23aed9, March 20th, 2014).

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Since GitLab 7.8 (Feb 2015), git-annex is integrated:

As far as we know GitLab is the first git repository management solution that integrates git-annex.
This is possible because both git-annex and GitLab stay very close to the unix paradigms. Internally GitLab uses GitLab Shell to handle ssh access and this was a great integration point for git-annex.
We've added a setting to GitLab Shell so you can disable GitLab Annex support if you don't want it.

Atheroma