Development on Windows is not well supported, unfortunately. You will have a much easier time if you develop on Mac or Linux as described under Development Environment section.
If you want to try using Windows for Dataverse development, your best best is to use Vagrant, as described below. Minishift is also an option. These instructions were tested on Windows 10.
Download and install Vagrant from https://www.vagrantup.com
Vagrant advises you to reboot but let’s install VirtualBox first.
Download and install VirtualBox from https://www.virtualbox.org
Note that we saw an error saying “Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.2.8 Setup Wizard ended prematurely” but then we re-ran the installer and it seemed to work.
Download and install Git from https://git-scm.com
Launch Git Bash and run the following commands:
git config --global core.autocrlf input
Pro tip: Use Shift-Insert to paste into Git Bash.
See also https://help.github.com/articles/dealing-with-line-endings/
If you skip this step you are likely to see the following error when you run vagrant up.
/tmp/vagrant-shell: ./install: /usr/bin/perl^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
From Git Bash, run the following command:
git clone https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse.git
From Git Bash, run the following commands:
cd dataverse
The dataverse directory you changed is the one you just cloned. Vagrant will operate on a file called Vagrantfile.
vagrant up
After a long while you hopefully will have Dataverse installed at http://localhost:8888
Minishift is a dev environment for OpenShift, which is Red Hat’s distribution of Kubernetes. The Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift section contains much more detail but the essential steps for using Minishift on Windows are described below.
Download and install VirtualBox from https://www.virtualbox.org
Download and install Git from https://git-scm.com
Download Minishift from https://docs.openshift.org/latest/minishift/getting-started/installing.html . It should be a zip file.
From Git Bash:
cd ~/Downloads
unzip minishift*.zip
mkdir ~/bin
cp minishift*/minishift.exe ~/bin
From Git Bash, run the following commands:
git config --global core.autocrlf input
git clone https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse.git
minishift start --vm-driver=virtualbox --memory=8GB
eval $(minishift oc-env)
oc new-project project1
cd ~/dataverse
oc new-app conf/openshift/openshift.json
minishift console
This should open a web browser. In Microsoft Edge we saw INET_E_RESOURCE_NOT_FOUND so if you see that, try Chrome instead. A cert error is expected. Log in with the username “developer” and any password such as “asdf”.
Under “Overview” you should see a URL that has “dataverse-project1” in it. You should be able to click it and log into Dataverse with the username “dataverseAdmin” and the password “admin”.
We have been unable to get Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to work. We tried following the steps at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10 but the “Get” button was greyed out when we went to download Ubuntu.
For more discussion of Windows support for Dataverse development see our community list thread “Do you want to develop on Windows?” We would be happy to inconrporate feedback from Windows developers into this page. The Writing Documentation section describes how.