Where is Visual Studio's git.exe location?

Question

I'm configuring git through command line but changes seems doesn't apply to Visual Studio's git actions, so I'm wondering perhaps VS uses another git instance with other configs, where can I find which git.exe is getting used by VS?

Answer 1

VS2019 appears to have a near full-blown install of Git for Windows hidden within it's installation. The only thing that appears to be stripped out of it is Mintty. So you can set the GIT_PATH env var as well as GIT_SSH just like in Git for Windows and use it via CLI as easily as using git in Visual Studio.

You can find the path here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer\Git\cmd

and here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer\Git\mingw32\bin

Set your path to the first one (this is what Git for Windows uses).

Answer 2

Visual Studio gets the location of the various git tools from the config file in the .git folder, for example, in lines like this:

[difftool "vsdiffmerge"]
    cmd = \"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2019\\Community\\Common7\\IDE\\CommonExtensions\\Microsoft\\TeamFoundation\\Team Explorer\\vsdiffmerge.exe\" \"$LOCAL\" \"$REMOTE\" //t
    keepBackup = false

Other than that, the only place I can find a git.exe on my PC is here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer\Git\mingw32\bin\git.exe