Dev Setup: Windows

Windows development in 2020 and beyond

In the last few years, Windows has made huge progress with something called "WSL", which stands for Windows Subsystem for Linux. What this means is that you can put Linux inside of Windows, and use it for development.

Developing CodeCombat directly on Windows (not using WSL) is not recommended. It has a tendency to break, and it is hard to get it working well. Instead, we strongly recommend using WSL to develop your code.

Preparing your Windows computer for development with WSL

Installing WSL only takes a few steps. There is now also WSL2, which is not required, but makes things a lot faster and is highly recommended.

• Install WSL (or WSL2)
• More details TBD

Tools

You will need to install the following:

• Node.js (LTS version should be fine, but Stable is preferred)
• Git
• Python 2.7

Set Up

First open up cmd.exe/Powershell/Git Bash/any terminal.

You'll want to fork the repo on Github, then clone it to your machine.

git clone https://github.com/$GITHUB_USERNAME/codecombat.git
cd codecombat
git remote add -f upstream https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat.git

You'll then want to install the dependencies and build the asset files.

npm install --global --production windows-build-tools@3.1.0
npm install

Running

npm run webpack -- --watch
npm run proxy

Either run both of the above commands (live coding) or just npm run proxy (just previewing) to run the website locally.

Visit http://localhost:3000 to see your CodeCombat setup in action.