Use winget to install Git for Windows with Unix tools

For years I’ve been using Chocolately for quickly installing git on new Windows and it’s pretty handy. Recently though I looked into doing the same with winget since it comes built into Windows now which makes it easier to just give to the command to a co-worker.

One thing I always do though is enable the option to add the common linux tools to the path.

With Chocolately you could just add the /GitAndUnixToolsOnPath param like this:

choco install git.install -y --params="'/GitAndUnixToolsOnPath'"

It turns out that is a convenience option added to the chocolately package so it took a bit of digging to figure out how do it with winget but I eventually arrived at the following:

winget install --id Git.Git -e --source winget --custom '/o:PathOption=CmdTools'

You need the --custom param for the install command that let’s you pass arguments to the git installer.

Then I just had to reference the handy docs for the installer for git for windows and find which arguments corresponded to the options I wanted. PathOption=CmdTools in this case.