obsidian-git: [Bug]: custom Git binary path using wsl doesn't work

[note: suspected cause at the very end; skip ahead and come back if that’s not it]

I have Git installed in WSL and added a shell script in my home that will take care of connecting to the ssh-agent etc. followed by actually running the requested git command. Despite the command working in both PowerShell and plain CMD, Obsidian Git reports “cannot run git command”.

Are you sure that the custom git binary path code actually works?
If yes, what’s the required format?

I have tried both C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe /home/REDACTED/bin/ogit as well as just wsl.exe /home/REDACTED/bin/ogit or wsl /home/REDACTED/bin/ogit (in case there’s a problem with handling backslashes…)

In CMD and PowerShell, both work:

C:\Users\REDACTED\Desktop\maps\obsidian>wsl /home/REDACTED/bin/ogit status
On branch master
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 2 commits.
  (use "git push" to publish your local commits)

Changes to be committed:
  (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)

        modified:   .obsidian/plugins/obsidian-git/data.json


C:\Users\REDACTED\Desktop\maps\obsidian>C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe /home/REDACTED/bin/ogit status
On branch master
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 2 commits.
  (use "git push" to publish your local commits)

Changes to be committed:
  (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)

        modified:   .obsidian/plugins/obsidian-git/data.json

C:\Users\REDACTED\Desktop\maps\obsidian>C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe /home/REDACTED/bin/ogit push
Host key fingerprint is SHA256:<redacted>
Enumerating objects: 38, done.
Counting objects: 100% (38/38), done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (27/27), done.
Writing objects: 100% (29/29), 6.13 KiB | 184.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 29 (delta 4), reused 0 (delta 0)
To <redacted>:repos/obsidian-vault.git
   <redacted>..<redacted>  master -> master

In Obsidian, all variants fail.

So there seems to be some special formatting / adjustment to the command required to make it work when run from Obsidian. (Or maybe it just doesn’t work at all?)

While I don’t really understand JS & related languages, from a quick scan of the code in src/simpleGit.ts, the following seem strange:

isGitInstalled, commitAll, and push all appear to hard-code the git command; if isGitInstalled gatekeeps the running of all other commands, then it’s not surprising that nothing works

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created 3 years ago
Comments: 15

Most upvoted comments

Progress! After the update, I’m getting /bin/bash: status: command not found which is exactly the error message that wsl status generates.

So it looks like something drops the second part of wsl /home/REDACTED/bin/ogit, and I confirmed that with an experiment. (Details below.)

For now, I added an extra git.cmd wrapper somewhere in the %PATH% and then wondered why it doesn’t work until I found out that apparently I need to add the full C:\... path in spite of it being in %PATH% (where both cmd and powershell find & run it without problems). So now things mostly work for me!

I’d love to see the argument-dropping problem fixed eventually (so I no longer need the second wrapper) but it’s not urgent.

Experiment: To test the argument dropping, I added symlinks named status, branch, … in /usr/local/bin to another wrapper that calls /home/REDACTED/bin/ogit "$(basename "$0")" "$@" (i.e. reroutes those program names to become a git command), such that wsl status, wsl branch, … will work like wsl /home/REDACTED/bin/ogit status, … and that confirms this guess: With that in place, I can select the branch from the drop-down in the obsidian-git config and I get a “git: ready” in the status bar, i.e. basic communication with git works. (Adding lots of other wrappers for add/commit/push/… means I can use the source control view to add, commit, push/pull and it all works, as verified externally.)

Just for reference, in case others want my full solution for getting WSL’s git working: There’s a git.cmd

@echo off
C:\Windows\System32\wsl.exe /home/REDACTED/bin/obsidian-git %*

and since %PATH% search doesn’t work anyway, just place that anywhere and specify the full path to it as the custom command. On the Linux side, there’s the obsidian-git wrapper that connects to the running ssh-agent and then calls git:

#!/bin/sh
source ${HOME}/.profile > /dev/null 2>&1 # this is where my config does the ssh-agent connecting
git "$@"

and in case you don’t have an automated ssh-agent setup yet, eval "$(keychain --eval --agents ssh)" in e.g. your .profile with keychain installed gets that done without lots of duplicate ssh-agents. (Just ssh-add the key once after boot to unlock/cache it and you’re done.)

229c9cf0 on Nov 26, 2021

Just noticed activity on this issue - wanted to put in my 2 cents since I have a working solution that satisfies me.

My motivation: I want Windows Obsidian to use WSL’s git for obsidian-git, because my WSL has my ssh keys in the agent and also my git repo has git-crypt set up.

I have the latest obsidian-git patched with #587 (just updated to latest in my fork)
I have the Custom Git binary path setting point to C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\scripts\wsl_git.cmd I believe I didnt run into the issue described above simply because my Windows user has no spaces. I’d suggest attempting to escape them with \ , but can’t test that theory.
Contents of wsl_git.cmd, inspired by this thread:

@echo off
wsl.exe /home/<wsl user>/bin/obsidian-git %*

Contents of ~/bin/obsidian-git, which ensures my env is properly set up (most importantly, the correct SSH_AUTH_SOCK):

#!/bin/bash
source ${HOME}/.profile > /dev/null 2>&1
git "$@"

The last one is optional, if you don’t need your .profile you can just have wsl_git.cmd pointing to the wsl git binary instead.

With this setup, obsidian-git pulls and pushes to my remote seamlessly using my WSL auth configuration.

Hope this helps!

H3mul on Mar 3, 2024