Background

So apparently there's this pandemic thing, which means I'm teaching "Alternate Delivery" courses now. These are just like online courses, except possibly more synchronous, definitely less polished, and the tuition money doesn't go to the College of Extended Learning. I figure I'll need to manage share videos, and our learning management system, in the immortal words of Marie Kondo, does not bring me joy. This has caused me to revisit the problem of sharing large files in an ikiwiki based site (like the one you are reading).

My goto solution for large file management is git-annex. The last time I looked at this (a decade ago or so?), I was blocked by git-annex using symlinks and ikiwiki ignoring them for security related reasons. Since then two things changed which made things relatively easy.

I started using the rsync_command ikiwiki option to deploy my site.
git-annex went through several design iterations for allowing non-symlink access to large files.

TL;DR

In my ikiwiki config

    # attempt to hardlink source files? (optimisation for large files)
    hardlink => 1,

In my ikiwiki git repo

$ git annex init
$ git annex add foo.jpg
$ git commit -m'add big photo'
$ git annex adjust --unlock                 # look ikiwiki, no symlinks
$ ikiwiki --setup ~/.config/ikiwiki/client  # rebuild my local copy, for review
$ ikiwiki --setup /home/bremner/.config/ikiwiki/rsync.setup --refresh  # deploy

You can see the result at photo