git lfs not working correctly - related to having no .gitconfig file?

Question

I've got a git repo with many large files that I need to access from my personal laptop and my AWS EC2 instance. For institutional reasons I'm accessing the instance through AWS SSM, and working as sudo. I keep having issues with (1) pushing large files to remote from AWS, as well as (2) getting errors when running my code because on startup my large files get replaced with their pointers instead of the actual file. Here's my (perhaps technically challenged) summary of what I've done and tried:

• I installed git and cloned my repos, then installed git lfs. This obviously failed to grab full files, so I had to git lfs migrate and then perform a git lfs pull. It all seemed to be working after this. I was able to create large files and push them to remote.
• When I stopped the instance and signed back in I found I had to perform 'git lfs pull' to get the large files because they were defaulting to the pointers on restart.
• I tried pushing some new large files and it's erroring out, saying:

remote: error: GH001: Large files detected. You may want to try Git Large File Storage - https://git-lfs.github.com.
remote: error: Trace: be4db70fb591a3183909102e8bbb8ba4
remote: error: See http://git.io/iEPt8g for more information.
remote: error: File deterministic/outputs/s_consequences_SCM6p5_AHRAO_b0_434.csv is 370.07 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100.00 MB
remote: error: File deterministic/outputs/s_consequences_SCM5p8_AHRAM_b0_421.csv is 154.72 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100.00 MB
remote: error: File deterministic/outputs/s_dmgbyasset_IDM6p8_JdFP_b0_17.csv is 155.28 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100.00 MB
remote: error: File deterministic/outputs/s_dmgbyasset_SCM5p8_AHRAM_b0_421.csv is 142.86 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100.00 MB
remote: error: File deterministic/outputs/s_dmgbyasset_SCM6p5_AHRAO_b0_434.csv is 335.78 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100.00 MB
remote: error: File deterministic/outputs/s_lossesbyasset_SCM5p8_AHRAM_b0_423.csv is 136.97 MB; this exceeds GitHub's file size limit of 100.00 MB
To https://github.com/PROJECT/oqREPO.git
 ! [remote rejected] tieganh -> tieganh (pre-receive hook declined)
error: failed to push some refs to 'https://github.com/PROJECT/oqREPO.git'

• I tried a hard reset to the commit before adding the large files, did a git lfs pull, re-committed, and then pushed. It still fails with the same error.
• I checked that my large csv files are being tracked with more .gitattributes:

ProjectMaterials/OQWorkshop_Montreal/EqRisk_Nov2019_THEdit.key filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text
ProjectMaterials/OQWorkshop_Montreal/OQWorkshopTraining.key filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text
*.csv filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text

• I tried checking if lfs was correctly installed on my ~/.gitconfig but found that it doesn't exist. It also doesn't exist in ~/.config/git/config, on sudo or as a regular user. Maybe because I was having an issue with mounting my storage volume at first, and accidentally had mounted my root directory to a different location for a while? I'm in over my head a bit.

I'd really appreciate any help with this issue, either to fix my current repo or to help with reinstalling and moving to a new [clean] repo. For reference, I'm on Ubuntu 18.04 and the output of git lfs env is:

git-lfs/2.3.4 (GitHub; linux amd64; go 1.8.3)
git version 2.17.1

Endpoint=https://github.com/PROJECT/oqREPO.git/info/lfs (auth=basic)
LocalWorkingDir=/root/storage/oqREPO
LocalGitDir=/root/storage/oqREPO/.git
LocalGitStorageDir=/root/storage/oqREPO/.git
LocalMediaDir=/root/storage/oqREPO/.git/lfs/objects
LocalReferenceDir=
TempDir=/root/storage/oqREPO/.git/lfs/tmp
ConcurrentTransfers=3
TusTransfers=false
BasicTransfersOnly=false
SkipDownloadErrors=false
FetchRecentAlways=false
FetchRecentRefsDays=7
FetchRecentCommitsDays=0
FetchRecentRefsIncludeRemotes=true
PruneOffsetDays=3
PruneVerifyRemoteAlways=false
PruneRemoteName=origin
LfsStorageDir=/root/storage/oqREPO/.git/lfs
AccessDownload=basic
AccessUpload=basic
DownloadTransfers=basic
UploadTransfers=basic
git config filter.lfs.process = ""
git config filter.lfs.smudge = ""
git config filter.lfs.clean = ""

Answer 1

In order for Git LFS to work, you need to have the filter configuration properly set up with Git. The easiest way to do that is by running git lfs install before you work with any Git LFS repositories.

If you have no configuration files, then you don't have the proper filter configuration set up, and Git LFS won't work. That's why you have the problems pushing: because Git LFS wasn't invoked by Git, and as a result you just stored the files in the repository as large Git files. Even if you could push them, they'd later on show as modified if you cloned the repository again.

You should make sure git lfs install has been run and then run git lfs migrate import --everything to fix this.