Windows 8 + Git + Composer + SSH

Question

So, I've been using ubuntu linux for a few months and loved it for my web dev. Everything simply works!

But I switched back to windows because linux sadly doesn't run 90% of my apps :(

So now I have a question, how do you work with git, composer and ssh on windows? Should I setup a linux virtualbox or is it possible to be able to work comfortably without it?

Answer 1

"TortoiseGit" is a nice extension if you prefer some graphical support, and this needs "msysgit" to give the git commands on windows - which also brings you "git bash" if you prefer the command line. "msysgit" could be installed standalone.

SSH under Windows is always Putty. Grab the newest release 0.63, it has security fixes. To work easily with git then, you need to setup the whole public key authentication with "pageant" running in the background. Putty does a bad job configuring it to convenient levels, you have to manually add it to autostart. Or you could either use KeePass with the KeeAgent plugin to get the same (I prefer it a lot: All authentication stuff in one location).

Executing composer is a question of having installed PHP >= 5.3. If PHP is installed, you execute the alternative install command (without curl) and are nearly ready to go. Having PHP and the composer.phar in the path or add their location to the path eases things a lot.

Caveat: I have no experience with Windows 8 so far, things might be different there. My suggestions are supposed to work on Win 7 at least.

The biggest drawback of Windows is that there is no decent shell support I'd like. Having a virtual machine still is a good idea, but you need your development tools within Windows as well.