Cannot specify GIT binary directory

Description

Greetings,

The GitHub Desktop system requires an enhancement. This enhancement should enable the use of portable GIT binaries.

Version

• GitHub Desktop:

• Operating system: Windows 7

Steps to Reproduce

Expected Behavior

Actual Behavior

Additional Information

n/a

Logs

n/a

Thanks, coast

[shiftkey]

The systems require an enhanced “Git CMD” prompt due to lack of admin rights to install/modify the systems’ Path environment variable.

You can change environment variables for your account without needing admin rights like this:

I went through these steps to test how Desktop works with a portable Git install:

• downloading the latest PortableGit archive and extracting it to C:\Users\shiftkey\Desktop\PortableGit

• finding the Path environment variable for my current user and selecting “Edit”:

• adding C:\Users\shiftkey\Desktop\PortableGit\cmd\ to my user’s PATH environment variable (don’t forget the cmd here!)

• launch GitHub Desktop again and launch Open in Command Prompt

• no error, and git now works

For the moment we don’t plan to add a “Locate Git” option here, and instead rely on the user to setup PATH (this works for all OSes Desktop runs on currently) so I’m going to close this out as “by design”.

If the pain here ends up with more issues like this it suggests that we need to revisit this dialog and make it clear what we’re looking for.

[lmstearn]

Thanks, changing the PATH worked. A Locate Git button isn’t a bad idea, might be a bit of work changing the PATH string for Git via the registry though. These days, altering such registry keys isn’t de rigeur, and usually requires account elevation (perhaps even as a dedicated child process after install), which explains why the Git clients don’t do it.