Introduction to WSL Git for Windows

For Biostat 203B, a hard requirement is knowing how to work with version control using git, specifically using git over SSH. Ordinarily, this requires the installation of a git client on Windows (i.e. Git for Windows) and then having to manage SSH keys on Windows using an external keygen. It turns out that Git for Windows ships with the MinGW64 toolchain, which completely avoids the issue of an external keygen. This can be accessed by running Git Bash once Git for Windows is installed. The advantage of this is that RStudio on Windows supports and is integrated Git for Windows, making it easy to do version control. This tutorial will be a how to in excessive detail.

Installation Instructions

Downloading and Running the Git for Windows Binary Installer

Simply navigate to Git for Windows and download the appropriate version (for most of you, it will be 64-bit Git for Windows Setup).

Choosing the default editor used by Git

Go through the installation instructions as you would any other program, until you hit choosing the default editor used by Git.

I strongly suggest you know basic vim commands, if you choose vim, or else your life may be very painful.

Adjusting your PATH environment

Make sure to select the Git from the command line and also 3rd-party software, if this is not selected, RStudio will not find Git.

Choosing HTTPS transport backend

Leave the default option of Use the OpenSSL library.

Configuring the line-ending conversions

For historical reasons, Windows and Linux encode line-breaks differently, this occasionally causes problems for people unfamiliar. Choose the default option of Checkout Windows-style, commit Unix-style line endings.

Configuring the terminal editor to use with Git Bash

This option doesn’t matter, leave the default option Use MinTTY

Configuring extra options

Leave these unchanged.

Configuring experimental options

Leave the default option (unselected).

After configuring all of the options, continue with installation.

Using Git Bash

Conveniently, Git Bash ships with all of the tools needed for Biostat 203B (grep, awk, sed and ssh). For the text processing, the command are identical to lecture. For completeness sake, I will review SSH using Git Bash.

Setting up SSH keys in Git Bash

Open a Git Bash terminal to get to window like this:

We want to test whether or not we can SSH into the server, so simply run the command:

ssh USERNAME@server.ucla-biostat-203b.com

You’ll have a prompt about adding the server to the list of known hosts, pass yes. Then, you should have a prompt for password, which is just your server password.

Now that we’ve confirmed that SSH works in Git Bash, the remaining instructions are identical to the rest of lecture instructions for SSH, so we will omit them.

Configure Rstudio to use Git for Windows

So long as you’ve installed to the default installation path, Git for Windows should be automatically detected by Rstudio.

If not, go ahead and go to Tools > Global options...and select the Git/SVN tab. If its configured correctly, it should look like this:

If it isn’t configured, you should point to the Git executable to wherever you’ve installed Git on your PC.