Let Pycharm Use WSL’s Git Executable

This post is mostly for me but I ran into a ton of conflicting information while troubleshooting my Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and PyCharm integration and figured it may help someone else. First things first. Versions matter! Before wasting your time trying to get Pycharm and WSL to play nicely, make sure you are running PyCharm2020.2 or greater and WSL 2. If you a) have no idea what those versions mean or b) are not sure what version you are using, allow me a chance to explain.

Why does WSL 2 matter? WSL 2 is a virtualization tool developed by Microsoft that uses a Microsoft fork of the Linux kernal to utilize way more features than the previous version of WSL. Some highlights from the official documentation:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-index

Why does this matter for the task of allowing PyCharm to just use the git executable that ships with a Ubuntu (or any other Linux image from the App store) WSL instance? PyCharm is a Windows and we would like to configure it to use the Git executable that will make system calls through the Windows Linux kernal. There is a lot going on to make it possible for PyCharm to call Git in a virtualized Linux environment. PyCharm has an issue on YouTrack that explains,

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-172253

With the understanding that versions matter, make sure you are running the latest PyCharm and use the following commands in Powershell (as an administrator) to see what is going on with WSL.

That output shows that I have two Linux instances using WSL. It also tells me they are stopped and running WSL version 2. If you see that you are using version 1, or you have VirtualBox on your machine and it has not been updated in a while, you will need to get your system ready for WSL 2. Read the documentation on how to set up WSL 2. As a quick reference, here are the commands I found myself double checking. Please note, after running the commands in an elevated Powershell prompt, you will need to perform a system restart.

Enable WSL

Enable Virtual Machine Platform

Set HyperVisor Launch Option to Auto

Now you can connect PyCharm to the WSL Git executable. Go to Settings > Version Control > Git and you should be able to point PyCharm 2020.2 to a WSL executable. For example, to use the Ubutnu-20.04 Git executable, the path would look something like:

This post details the “happy path” for getting everything set up. You may run into issue, especially if you have been using virtualization software on your system like VirtualBox or VSphere. This post is really a way to consolidate a number of good answers on Github, StackOverflow, and the WSL 2 FAQ into something that gives background as well as an answer to “How can I configure PyCharm to use the Git executable installed with WSL?”