Install or update inside MSYS2, Cygwin or Git for windows itself

It's different from Install inside MSYS2 proper

Instead of configuring and installing Git for Windows using pacman, this guide introduces another approach to properly install or update Git for Windows inside MSYS2, Cygwin or even Git for Windows itself. The only thing you need is a bash interpreter on Windows and a curl.

How to

With the script getgit introduced by git-for-windows/build-extra#261, you can download and run the script or just run curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git-for-windows/build-extra/HEAD/git-extra/getgit | bash.

The script would gather information about the current system ( Msys / Cygwin ), bitness, version of an already existed Git for Windows, version of the latest released Git for Windows... and then forge a proper download URL targeting a proper version of the PortableGit installer. With all the information prepared, the script would download the installer and unpack it to /tmp. After that, all the necessary files will be copied to a proper place inside the ( Msys's / Cygwin's ) file system without touching any existing non-git-for-windows-exclusive files.

Additionally, the getgit script will produce two scripts ctxmenu.bat and rm-ctxmenu.bat which could add and remove Git GUI Here and Git Bash Here context menu items. But note that, these two context menu items although seem alike with the ones of Git for Windows, they are actually different! They just provided similar outcomes and functionality yet still not the same things.

Known issue

• On Cygwin, the final Git Bash Here won't have a nice prompt that has the current branch of a git repo folder shown. To fix this, you need to remove the PS1=... line in /etc/bash.bashrc.
• If some Permission denied errors raised, please run your bash as Administrator to make sure this script runs with write privilege granted. And if something similar happens against ctxmenu.bat script or rm-ctxmenu.bat, run it as Administrator as well.