Git change '.git' folder name in windows

Question

Hi,

By default git init creates a folder called '.git'. In the recent Visual Studio tools (2005 and up) this works fine. But Visual Studio 2003 (and ... VB6 as well probably) crashes on this foldername. ideally I would like to change this per repository to something like 'git' instead of '.git'. Is this possible?

I know this has been asked before (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/672655/relocating-the-git-folder) ... but that was in a linux environment. I'm using windows at work sigh.

Hoping there is a simple solution .. otherwise I'll just have to wing it :o But I would rather use sexy git.

edit:

How do you set the GIT_DIR variable on windows? I googled it but it didn't make much sense.

edit2:

Wouldn't an environment variable set it for all repositories on that machine? If so I would have to go into every repository and move the folder manually ... also, I tried setting it to 'git' and when I open the git gui app it tells me "cannot use funny .git repository git". When I use the git console it works ... but honestly this is far from a good solution.

Answer 1

The GIT_DIR variable allows you to specify another location for the repository.

Answer 2

You should be able to set the GIT_DIR environment variable, using this Knowledge Base guide.

Answer 3

On Linux, at least, git has a command line option called --git-dir. Whenever you run git, use the --git-dir option. This should exist in the Windows version too, so you could do

 git --git-dir=git_directory status

Perhaps you could put that in a batch file or something to make your life easier.

Answer 4

I'd suppose the easiest way is to not have any .sln files in the project root.

The project here has about 50 .sln files.

Answer 5

Create all projects at least one level below the repository root.