Windows Development

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.

Vagrant commands appear below and were tested on Windows 10 but the Vagrant environment is currently broken. Please see https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues/6849

Contents:

Running the Dataverse Software in Vagrant
Improving Windows Support
- Windows Subsystem for Linux
- Discussion and Feedback

Running the Dataverse Software in Vagrant

Install Vagrant

Download and install Vagrant from https://www.vagrantup.com

Vagrant advises you to reboot but let’s install VirtualBox first.

Install VirtualBox

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.

Reboot

Again, Vagrant asks you to reboot, so go ahead.

Install Git

Download and install Git from https://git-scm.com

Configure Git to use Unix Line Endings

Launch Git Bash and run the following commands:

git config --global core.autocrlf input

Pro tip: Use Shift-Insert to paste into Git Bash.

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

Clone Git Repo

From Git Bash, run the following command:

git clone https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse.git

vagrant up

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 a Dataverse installation available at http://localhost:8888

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.

Discussion and Feedback

For more discussion of Windows support for Dataverse Software development see our community list thread “Do you want to develop on Windows?” We would be happy to incorporate feedback from Windows developers into this page. The Writing Documentation section describes how.