Get Git with PowerShell

If you are creating PowerShell scripts, tools or modules today, you are most likely using Git. What? You're not? Is it because you haven't gotten around to installing it? I have some "quick and dirty" PowerShell hacks to help you out on Windows systems. Linux boys and girls already know what to do.

Naturally you could run a search to find the download link for the latest version of Git. Or if you are using Chocolatey you most likely know how to find and install packages. But perhaps you don't (or can't) use Chocolatey. That's ok. PowerShell can make quick work of this task.

#download the latest 64bit version of Git for Windows
$uri = 'https://git-scm.com/download/win'
#path to store the downloaded file
$path = $env:temp

#get the web page
$page = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $uri -UseBasicParsing 

#get the download link
$dl = ($page.links | where outerhtml -match 'git-.*-64-bit.exe' | select -first 1 * ).href

#split out the filename
$filename = split-path $dl -leaf

#construct a filepath for the download
$out = Join-Path -Path $path -ChildPath $filename

#download the file
Invoke-WebRequest -uri $dl -OutFile $out -UseBasicParsing

#check it out
Get-item $out

My code assumes you are running on a 64bit system. The comments should explain how it all works. When run you'll get the latest setup executable. I recommend manually installing it so you can configure it as needed.

Related to this you might need a merge conflict tool. I use kdiff3. Here's similar code to download it.

$k = invoke-webrequest https://sourceforge.net/projects/kdiff3/files/kdiff3/0.9.98/KDiff3-64bit-Setup_0.9.98-2.exe/download -UseBasicParsing
$dl = $k.links | where href -match downloads
$dluri = $dl.href.split("?")[0]
$filename = Split-Path $dluri -Leaf
$out = Join-Path $path -ChildPath $filename

Invoke-WebRequest -uri $dluri -OutFile $out -UseBasicParsing

get-item $out

Again, go ahead and install it manually.

My last git hack is to use PowerShell to get the version. If you have git installed, you can easily run

git --version

In Windows you'll get something like git version 2.14.1.windows.1. But being the PowerShell geek that I am, I wanted to display just the version number. So I used a regular expression to extract the value.

$v = git --version
[regex]$rx ="(\d+\.){1,}\d+"
$rx.match($v).value

This same code will also work in open source PowerShell on Linux. Although Windows users can also check the registry:

Get-itemproperty HKLM:\SOFTWARE\GitForWindows | Select CurrentVersion,InstallPath

Want to check the latest git for Windows release to know if you need to download? Use this function.

Function Get-GitCurrentRelease {
[cmdletbinding()]
Param(
[ValidateNotNullorEmpty()]
[string]$Uri = "https://api.github.com/repos/git-for-windows/git/releases/latest"
)

Begin {
    Write-Verbose "[BEGIN  ] Starting: $($MyInvocation.Mycommand)"  

} #begin

Process {
    Write-Verbose "[PROCESS] Getting current release information from $uri"
    $data = Invoke-Restmethod -uri $uri -Method Get

    
    if ($data.tag_name) {
    [pscustomobject]@{
        Name = $data.name
        Version = $data.tag_name
        Released = $($data.published_at -as [datetime])
      }
   } 
} #process

End {
    Write-Verbose "[END    ] Ending: $($MyInvocation.Mycommand)"
} #end

}

Fun, right? Now there's no excuse for setting up git on your Windows desktop.

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