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
tofalse
or0
. This forceswslgit
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 variableWSLENV
contains the string"BASH_ENV"
, thenwslgit
assumes that the forced startup script fromBASH_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/
.