How to advice developers after merging feature branch to master to enable git LFS (git)

Question

Details :

• We are trying to migrate our repo to git LFS
• I have a branch that will enable git lfs, what I am doing is updating a .gitattributes file, and creating a tracker which in turn created pointers to track all the files that need to be part of the LFS
• Now I would have to advise the developers what they need to do once this feature branch is to merged into the default/master

The problem that I need to understand?

• Now what I have advised and found in general is before updating to the master/default, ie, rebasing to master/default, I told them to do the below for all the feature branches that they have which obviously till this point do not have the git lfs changes in them

brew install git-lfs (this will be system-wide)
git lfs install (this will be on the root directory of the repo, for each branch)

• Now for the devs, this will be a manual step, and they somehow want this to be automated for them, which I assume may be done through git hooks, or some other way so that they do not have to update every branch I am thinking of a plumbing bash command as such might do it? Is this feasible

for branch in $(git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)' refs/heads/); do 
    git lfs install "$branch"; 
done

Update1

• Seems the above does do git lfs install on all the branches that you have in your local history and does it in one time.
• But I would still want to know and understand what is best practice

Answer 1

There should not be any need to run git lfs install in all branches – once you do install in a repo, it is set up permanently for that repo. From the help:

$ git lfs install --help
git lfs install [options]

Perform the following actions to ensure that Git LFS is setup properly:

* Set up the clean and smudge filters under the name "lfs" in the global Git
  config.
* Install a pre-push hook to run git lfs pre-push for the current repository,
  if run from inside one. If "core.hooksPath" is configured in any Git
  configuration (and supported, i.e., the installed Git version is at least
  2.9.0), then the pre-push hook will be installed to that directory instead.

Hooks are stored within the .git folder, so they are not affected when you check out a different branch.

Now, as you appear to be aware, if people have branches that are older than your merge of the new .gitattributes file, they would need to rebase those branches to pick up the changes and ensure the right files were treated as LFS ones. But this is not related to git lfs install.