Do I need to install Git?

(Matthew Jones) #1

I’ve just set up a new Windows server and installed Continua CI. It can’t connect to bitbucket, saying “Unexpected error reported from server: Unable to get path to the version control executable for Git using the server property collector ‘git.default.path’. Check that Git version control client is installed and property collector is searching the correct paths to find the executable.”

I don’t understand what this means, and there is nothing in the install instructions about needing anything else to use it. If git access is not built in I expect there would be instruction on what to do? What am I missing please?

(Matthew Jones) #2

Hmm, I see from the tutorial that I do have to manually install Git. This should be clearer. Nothing in the install instructions, nothing in the pre-requisite list. Quite a fundamental documentation fail I think!

(Vincent Parrett) #3

Hi Matthew

Not everyone uses Git, or Mercurial, or TFS/VSO/AzureDevops/NewNameofSamething, or SVN… so making them requisites would be overkill. Whilst the property collector message might seem a bit daunting for a new user, the rest of the message pretty much tells you to install the Git client. We couldn’t possibly bundle every version control client with the installer (it would be huge), nor could we implement the client functionality in our own code.

(Matthew Jones) #4

Vincent,
I appreciate that - it is probably worth a mention in the installer section, and pre-requisites, that “of course you will also need to install the tools to access your repositories, and any build systems you might use, like FinalBuilder”. I hope you know I’m not naive on these things, but on setting up a “clean system” for this, I don’t want to overload it with stuff I don’t need. Likewise, if I didn’t care, I might have given up - how many others do so quietly?

Thanks for your help.