Use git installed in Windows Subsystem for Linux in Visual Studio Code

README.md

Proxy commands from Windows command line to Bash using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

These scripts allow you to proxy commands (specifically git, in this example) to the Windows Subsystem for Linux from the normal Windows command line environment. This allows you to work with a single installation of git (under your Linux distribution) instead of trying to manage two concurrent installations.

I explicitly created these scripts to allow using Git in Visual Studio Code without installing it under Windows.

Please note that I have not extensively tested edge cases! If you run into problems, please let me know!

Using WSL git in Visual Studio Code

1. Install the scripts somewhere on your normal Windows drive; e.g. C:\Users\USERNAME\dev\proxy_scripts.
2. In VSC, modify your settings.json file and add the git.path setting pointing to your git.bat file; e.g. "git.path": "c:\\Users\\USERNAME\\dev\\proxy_scripts\\git.bat"
3. Enjoy WSL git from the VSC GUI! (You might need to relaunch the app.)

Proxying further commands

If you want to proxy further commands, you can do so by duplicating git.bat and changing the command that is getting invoked (so replace git on line 6 with whatever command you want to proxy). Presumably, you could also add these scripts to your Windows PATH if you wanted to go the extra mile, though I'm not sure how that would interact with the WSL bash.exe environment (could end up round-tripping everything uselessly, if your Windows binary locations occur earlier in the PATH than the WSL ones).

Please enjoy responsibly!

Prior art

• wsl-alias offered a fantastic starting point for this approach and is a nifty project all around: https://github.com/leongrdic/wsl-alias
• wsl-proxy gave me the initial inspiration for writing simple proxy batch files: https://github.com/watzon/wsl-proxy

_proxy_cmd.bat

@echo off

:: Properly escape the command
:: Many thanks to wsl-alias for this logic: https://github.com/leongrdic/wsl-alias
set cmd=%*
set cmd=%cmd:\"=\\"%
set cmd=%cmd:\'=\\'%
set cmd=%cmd:\=/%
set cmd=%cmd://=\\%
set cmd=%cmd:"=\"%
set cmd=%cmd:'=\'%
set cmd=%cmd:(=\(%
set cmd=%cmd:)=\)%

:: Grab the path to our proxy Bash script (%~dp0 is the directory of this batch file)
set bash_proxy=%~dp0_proxy_cmd.sh
set bash_proxy=%bash_proxy:\=\\%

:: Pass things off to the Bash script
bash.exe -c "$(wslpath %bash_proxy%) %cmd%"

_proxy_cmd.sh

##
# Evaluates command, parsing paths at both ends (Windows => Unix => Windows)
#
# Benefits to doing this instead of directly invoking the command in the batch file:
# 
# + Easier to convert path arguments to Unix paths
# + sed regex does not require double escaping backslashes (not embedded in double quotes)
##

cmd=()
for arg in "$@"
do
	if [[ $arg =~ ^[a-zA-Z]:/ ]]; then
		cmd+=( $(wslpath "$arg") )
	else
		cmd+=("$arg")
	fi
done

# TODO: Look into ways to convert inline paths via `wslpath` instead of hard-coding `/mnt` search
# Kind of a tricky issue, because our output could be basically anything
eval "${cmd[@]}" | sed \
	-e 's|"/mnt/\([a-zA-Z]\)/\([^"]*\)"|"\1:/\2"|g' \
	-e "s|'/mnt/\\([a-zA-Z]\\)/\\([^']*\\)'|'\\1:/\\2'|g" \
	-e 's|/mnt/\([A-Za-z]\)/\([^ ]*\)|\1:/\2|g' \
	-e 's|/|\\|g'

git.bat

@echo off

:: %~dp0 is the directory of this batch file
set proxy_path=%~dp0_proxy_cmd.bat
:: %* is the full command passed to this batch file
%proxy_path% git %*

Thank you for the script, it does seem to work from within an ordinary Command Prompt in Windows, so thank you already for that.

However, I cannot seem to get VSCode to be aware of it. :( Using VSCode 1.93.1, I tried to configure the User setting "git.path" to refer to the "git.bat" location, or to its folder (I even tried both "/" as well as "\\" in the path) etc. but it kept failing: VSCode kept complaining that it does not recognize any Git installation. :(

Any ideas?

(p.s. I tried, using the WSL extension, to start VS Code either from Windows and run the command "WSL: Connect to WSL", or - hopefully equivalently - execute the command code . from inside the Ubuntu shell in the project directory after I cd-ed into it from the Ubuntu shell. In both cases, VSCode would run in the context of WSL and thanks to its WSL extension it would have access to WSL's git, without needing that cool .bat scripts. This seemed to work at a first glance. However, when I modified a file, it wasn't marked as modified in the Explorer pane in VSCode automatically, but I had to press the 'Refresh' button from inside the Source Control pane, which is an unacceptable workflow. So... bottom line: thank you for your scripts, but I gave up and eventually installed Git for Windows)

Yeah, unfortunately I can't really help debug because I haven't developed seriously on Windows in a while. 😕