VM causing magit not to work

Question

I have this error when I start emacs:

File error: Searching for program, no such file or directory, git

My Git is inside the VM in /usr/bin/git

How can I point emacs to it?

I'm using tramp and plink to communicate the VM and emacs.

I tried leaving in the .emacs file

(add-to-list 'exec-path "/plink:[email protected]:/usr/bin/")

But it didn't help.

I also tried to install Git into windows but then when I visit Git repositories in the VM, Git from windows doesn't have access to the remote FS. Specifically, I press M-x magit, and emacs says:

Git repository:<path to where I am>

Then I press enter

Then it says:

 Create repository in /plink:[email protected]:<path to where I am>

Whether I press Y or N, it doesn't help me.

Does anyone have any suggestions? How do I configure Magit to use the git binary on the remote machine?

Thanks

Answer 1

Tramp doesn't use exec-path, it uses tramp-remote-path. See https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Remote-programs.

Answer 2

The variable magit-git-executable can be customized. Its documentation:

magit-git-executable is a variable defined in ‘magit-git.el’. Its value is "git"

Documentation: The Git executable used by Magit.

So, you should be able to set it to something like [email protected]/usr/bin/git:

(setq magit-git-executable "[email protected]/usr/bin/git")

I don't have a VM handy to test this with, but that should do it. You might run into problems where Emacs passes fully-qualified paths to git, but that might cause problems with git.