Getting Started on Windows

Information

Native development of substrate is not very well supported! It is highly recommend to use Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) and follow the instructions for Ubuntu/Debian. Substrate development is easiest on Unix-based operating systems like macOS or Linux. The examples in the Substrate Tutorials and How-to Guides use Unix-style terminals to demonstrate how to interact with Substrate from the command line.

If you do decide to try and use a Windows computer to natively build Substrate, do the following:

Download and install "Build Tools for Visual Studio:"
- You can get it at this link: https://aka.ms/buildtools.
- Run the installation file: vs_buildtools.exe.
- Ensure the "Windows 10 SDK" component is included when installing the Visual C++ Build Tools.
- Restart your computer.
Install Rust:
- Detailed instructions are provided by the Rust Book.
  - Download from: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install.
  - Run the installation file: rustup-init.exe.
    Note
    It shouldn't prompt you to install vs_buildtools since you did it in step 1.
  - Choose "Default Installation."
  - To get started, you need Cargo's bin directory (%USERPROFILE%\.cargo\bin) in your PATH environment variable. Future applications will automatically have the correct environment, but you may need to restart your current shell.

Run these commands in Command Prompt (CMD) to set up your Wasm Build Environment:

rustup update nightly
rustup update stable
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown --toolchain nightly

Install LLVM: https://releases.llvm.org/download.html

Install OpenSSL with vcpkg using PowerShell:

mkdir C:\Tools
cd C:\Tools
git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git --depth=1
cd vcpkg
.\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
.\vcpkg.exe install openssl:x64-windows-static

Add OpenSSL to your System Variables using PowerShell:

$env:OPENSSL_DIR = 'C:\Tools\vcpkg\installed\x64-windows-static'
$env:OPENSSL_STATIC = 'Yes'
[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('OPENSSL_DIR', $env:OPENSSL_DIR, [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)
[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('OPENSSL_STATIC', $env:OPENSSL_STATIC, [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)

Install cmake: https://cmake.org/download/
Install make
- This can be done using Chocolatey. First you need to install the Chocolatey package manager: https://chocolatey.org/install
- Once Chocolatey installed you can install make:
```
choco install make
```