Set execute permission with Git from Windows

At my work, I am working usually with Windows. But when we started our migration to Linux Docker containers and Kubernetes, I've found one annoying issue. Once you create a bash file on Windows, push it to Git and after this, you try to execute this file in most cases, you will get a “Permission Denied” error.

But it turns out the solution is quite easy. So I am sharing it here, so it can maybe help you (or me) in the future.

The solution is the Git update-index command.
To set the execute permission you can use this command:

git update-index --chmod=+x path/to/file

To remove it, use:

git update-index --chmod=-x path/to/file

This will assign execute permission to the selected bash file. The only thing missing is to push the changes to the Git repository.

Deeper look

Let's check what is happening here underhood. Under the hood, Git doesn't have a unix files permission system. In reality, Git maintains a special "mode" for each file in its internal storage:

• 100644 for all regular files
• 100755 for executable files 

By default, when you add a file to a repository, Git will try to set the correct file mode accordingly.  But sometimes it fails.

To check file's file mode you can use ls-files command with the option --stage:

$ git ls-files --stage
100644 1ff0c423042b46cb1d617b81efb715defbe8054d 0       .gitattributes
100644 3c4efe206bd0e7230ad0ae8396a3c883c8207906 0       .gitignore
100755 1a82e9a4560497d8c6e273c61bfd01995524d58f 0       my_executable_script.sh

Thank you for reading, I hope this will help someone.