WSLGit

This project provides a small executable that forwards all arguments to git running inside Bash on Windows/Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

The primary reason for this tool is to make the Git plugin in Visual Studio Code (VSCode) work with the git command installed in WSL. For these two to interoperate, this tool translates paths between the Windows (C:\Foo\Bar) and Linux (/mnt/c/Foo/Bar) representations.

Download

The latest binary release can be found on the releases page.

You may also need to install the latest Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2017.

Usage in VSCode

To use this inside VSCode, put the wslgit.exe executable somewhere on your computer and set the appropriate path in your VSCode settings.json:

{
    "git.path": "C:\\CHANGE\\TO\\PATH\\TO\\wslgit.exe"
}

Also make sure that you use an SSH key without password to access your git repositories, or that your SSH key is added to a SSH agent running within WSL before starting VSCode. You cannot enter your passphrase in VSCode!

If you use a SSH agent, make sure that it does not print any text (like e.g. Agent pid 123) during startup of an interactive bash shell. If there is any additional output when your bash shell starts, the VSCode Git plugin cannot correctly parse the output.

Usage from the command line

Put the directory containing the executable somewhere on your Windows Path environment variable and optionally rename wslgit.exe to git.exe. To change the environment variable, type Edit environment variables for your account into Start menu/Windows search and use that tool to edit Path.

You can then just run any git command from a Windows console by running wslgit COMMAND or git COMMAND and it uses the Git version installed in WSL.

Remarks

Currently, the path translation and shell escaping is very limited, just enough to make it work in VSCode.

All absolute paths are translated, but relative paths are only translated if they point to existing files or directories. Otherwise it would be impossible to detect if an argument is a relative path or just some other string. VSCode always uses forward slashes for relative paths, so no translation is necessary in this case.

Additionally, be careful with special characters interpreted by the shell. Only spaces and newlines in arguments are currently handled.

Advanced Usage

Per default, wslgit executes git inside the WSL environment through bash started in interactive mode. This is to automatically support the common case where ssh-agent or similar tools are setup by .bashrc in interactive mode. However, this may significantly slow down the execution of git commands. To improve startup time, you can configure wslgit to execute git via a non-interactive bash session. This can be achieved using one of the following two methods:

In Windows, set the environment variable WSLGIT_USE_INTERACTIVE_SHELL to false or 0. This forces wslgit to start bash in non-interactive mode.
Alternatively, if the Windows environment variable BASH_ENV is set to a bash startup script and the environment variable WSLENV contains the string "BASH_ENV", then wslgit assumes that the forced startup script from BASH_ENV contains everything you need, and therefore also starts bash in non-interactive mode.

This feature is only available in Windows 10 builds 17063 and later.

Building from source

First, install Rust from https://www.rust-lang.org. Rust on Windows also requires Visual Studio or the Visual C++ Build Tools for linking.

The final executable can then be build by running

cargo build --release

inside the root directory of this project. The resulting binary will be located in ./target/release/.