Git LFS With Homebrew
So, I’ve been working on an internal Homebrew tap, and have been trying to get the automatic bottle packaging actions working. There’s a good blog post that describes the outcomes, but the Homebrew project supports internal taps on a best effort basis, so this doesn’t dig into all the issues you might encounter when setting it up internally.
By far the most time consuming issue I had was getting the git clone to find
git-lfs. One of the formulae I was building had a
gitattributes file that tags some
paths for git-lfs. When Homebrew tries to clone the repository, you get
the dreaded git-lfs filter-process: git-lfs: command not found error message,
and the clone fails.
This happens on macOS builders because Homebrew (for good reasons)
forces the PATH to be "/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin". Since macOS
doesn’t install git-lfs by default it would clearly not be found.
I tried a lot of different ways to work around this. The basic approch I took
was using Homebrew itself to install git-lfs on the Github runner and trying
to convince the git command to use it. You can’t just symlink git-lfs into
/usr/bin because that is a readonly part of the filesystem due to
SIP. I thought that setting the
HOMEBREW_FORCE_BREWED_GIT environment variable to get Homebrew to use it’s
own version of git would work, but that didn’t so much that I could see.
I also tried setting up a global ~/.gitconfig with a git-lfs
filter configuration passing absolute paths to the git-lfs command.
This almost works, but when git-lfs runs it installs post-checkout
hooks as a side-effect, and those
hooks
require git-lfs to be in the path.
So in the end, the solution is:
sudo ln -sf $(brew --prefix git-lfs)/bin/git-lfs $(/usr/bin/git --exec-path)/git-lfs
This symlinks the Homebrew version of git-lfs into the exec path
of the system git command. I can’t say that I know enough about
git internals to say exactly why this works, but it does, and it
cost me way more time that it was worth to figure it out.