Getting Started with Nylas Mail on Windows

Dependencies

Visual Studio 2013: You must have Visual Studio 2013 installed to build Nylas Mail's native node modules. See the notes about Visual Studio below if you encounter compilation errors. You can install Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition for free.
Node: You must have Node 6.x to run Nylas Mail's build script. Run node -v to check which version of NodeJS you are using.
Python 2.7: The python command must be on your PATH and must point to Python 2.7 (not 3.x)
Git: The git command must be on your PATH

Building

    git clone https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail.git
    cd nylas-mail
    npm config set msvs_version 2013 --global
    script\bootstrap.cmd

Running

    electron\electron.exe . --dev

Common Issues:

While script\bootstrap.cmd is designed to work out of the box, it needs to compile native extensions with node-gyp. If script\bootstrap.cmd fails due to a compilation error, it is likely a Visual Studio configuration issue.

Visual Studio

There are several versions of Visual Studio. node-gyp is designed to detect the current version installed on your system. Nylas Mail only officially supports Visual Studio 2013. If you are using Visual Studio 2015, be sure you chose to install the C++ features in the Visual Studio installer.

To ensure node-gyp uses Visual Studio 2013, run the following commands:

set GYP_MSVS_VERSION=2013
npm config set msvs_version 2013 --global

Node & NPM

We only use your system's Node to bootstrap apm. Once we have apm installed, your system's Node no longer matters and we install remaining packages with apm.

However, since bootstrapping this requires native extensions to be built, we need a version of node and node-gyp that is compatible with your current Visual Studio setup.

There is a small chance that depending on where you setup Nylas Mail, you will get an error about file paths being too long. If this happens, you will need to manually install npm 3.x (npm 2.x comes shipped with most Node installations).

Instead of running the whole script\bootstrap.cmd script to test this, you can cd into the \build folder, and from there run npm install. Only the build\package.json modules need your system's Node.

Python

The python executable must be on your PATH. Depending on how you installed Python, you may need to ensure the python.exe can be found.

Developing on Windows