Limiting file size in git repository

Question

I'm currently thinking of changing my VCS (from subversion) to git. Is it possible to limit the file size within a commit in a git repository? For e. g. subversion there is a hook: http://www.davidgrant.ca/limit_size_of_subversion_commits_with_this_hook

From my experience people, especially those who are inexperienced, sometimes tend to commit files which should not go into a VCS (e. g. big file system images).

Answer 1

As I was struggling with it for a while, even with the description, and I think this is relevant for others too, I thought I'd post an implementation of how what J16 SDiZ described could be implemented.

So, my take on the server-side update hook preventing too big files to be pushed:

#!/bin/bash  # Script to limit the size of a push to git repository. # Git repo has issues with big pushes, and we shouldn't have a real need for those # # eis/02.02.2012  # --- Safety check, should not be run from command line if [ -z "$GIT_DIR" ]; then         echo "Don't run this script from the command line." >&2         echo " (if you want, you could supply GIT_DIR then run" >&2         echo "  $0 <ref> <oldrev> <newrev>)" >&2         exit 1 fi  # Test that tab replacement works, issue in some Solaris envs at least testvariable=`echo -e "\t" | sed 's/\s//'` if [ "$testvariable" != "" ]; then         echo "Environment check failed - please contact git hosting." >&2         exit 1 fi   # File size limit is meant to be configured through 'hooks.filesizelimit' setting filesizelimit=$(git config hooks.filesizelimit)  # If we haven't configured a file size limit, use default value of about 100M if [ -z "$filesizelimit" ]; then         filesizelimit=100000000 fi  # Reference to incoming checkin can be found at $3 refname=$3  # With this command, we can find information about the file coming in that has biggest size # We also normalize the line for excess whitespace biggest_checkin_normalized=$(git ls-tree --full-tree -r -l $refname | sort -k 4 -n -r | head -1 | sed 's/^ *//;s/ *$//;s/\s\{1,\}/ /g' )  # Based on that, we can find what we are interested about filesize=`echo $biggest_checkin_normalized | cut -d ' ' -f4,4`  # Actual comparison # To cancel a push, we exit with status code 1 # It is also a good idea to print out some info about the cause of rejection if [ $filesize -gt $filesizelimit ]; then          # To be more user-friendly, we also look up the name of the offending file         filename=`echo $biggest_checkin_normalized | cut -d ' ' -f5,5`          echo "Error: Too large push attempted." >&2         echo  >&2         echo "File size limit is $filesizelimit, and you tried to push file named $filename of size $filesize." >&2         echo "Contact configuration team if you really need to do this." >&2         exit 1 fi  exit 0 

Note that it's been commented that this code only checks the latest commit, so this code would need to be tweaked to iterate commits between $2 and $3 and do the check to all of them.