Mailspring/docs/Windows.md
2015-11-17 15:48:59 -08:00

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Getting Started with N1 on Windows

Dependencies

  1. Visual Studio: You must have Visual Studio installed to build native extensions. See the notes about Visual Studio below if you encounter compilation errors.
  2. Node: Node 0.10, 0.11, 0.12, and 4.x supported
  3. Python 2.7: The python command must be on your PATH and must point to Python 2.7 (not 3.x)
  4. Git: The git command must be on your PATH

Building

    git clone https://github.com/nylas/N1.git
    cd N1
    script\bootstrap.cmd

Running

    electron\electron.exe . --dev

Common Issues:

While script\bootstrap.cmd is designed to work out of the box, we have to compile a few native extensions via node-gyp and expect certain programs to be available on your PATH. If script\bootstrap.cmd fails due to a compilation error, it is likely due to a Visual Studio problem.

Visual Studio

There are now several versions of Visual Studio. Node-gyp is designed to detect the current version installed on your system. If you are using Visual Studio 2015, you must be using a newer version of Node.

If during compilation, node-gyp looks in the wrong place for headers, you can explicitly set the version of Visual Studio you want it to use by setting the GYP_MSVS_VERSION environment variable to the year of your Visual Studio version. Valid values are 2015, 2013, 2013e, 2012, etc. (e stands for "express"). The full set of values are here

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 N1, 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.