Jenkins Slave on Windows – git clone failure

I recently setup a Jenkins job to run on a Windows slave that was triggered from a successful build on a Linux master and it failed with the following error:

Started by user anonymous
Building remotely on 10.13.0.11
Checkout:Deploy App Code / c:\jenkins-slave\workspace\Deploy App Code - hudson.remoting.Channel@1e5cd7a:10.13.0.11
Using strategy: Default
Checkout:Deploy App Code / c:\jenkins-slave\workspace\Deploy App Code - hudson.remoting.LocalChannel@132c800
Cloning the remote Git repository
Cloning repository origin
ERROR: Error cloning remote repo 'origin' : Error performing command: git --version
Cannot run program "git" (in directory "c:\jenkins-slave\workspace\Deploy App Code"): CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified
ERROR: Cause: Cannot run program "git" (in directory "c:\jenkins-slave\workspace\Deploy App Code"): CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified
Trying next repository
ERROR: Could not clone repository
FATAL: Could not clone
hudson.plugins.git.GitException: Could not clone
	at hudson.plugins.git.GitSCM$2.invoke(GitSCM.java:977)
	at hudson.plugins.git.GitSCM$2.invoke(GitSCM.java:908)
	at hudson.FilePath$FileCallableWrapper.call(FilePath.java:1979)
	at hudson.remoting.UserRequest.perform(UserRequest.java:118)
	at hudson.remoting.UserRequest.perform(UserRequest.java:48)
	at hudson.remoting.Request$2.run(Request.java:270)
	at java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Unknown Source)
	at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask$Sync.innerRun(Unknown Source)
	at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(Unknown Source)
	at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(Unknown Source)
	at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(Unknown Source)
	at hudson.remoting.Engine$1$1.run(Engine.java:60)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

The problem is that msysgit is installed with a path that points to the git.cmd executable batch file rather than git.exe in bin of the msysgit package.

To resolve this, I updated the PATH environment variable to point to the bin directory where git.exe was at rather than the git.cmd script.

I’ve seen a lot of folks change the Jenkins config to point to git.cmd instead of git but this will not work in an environment where you have both Linux and Windows hosts.