A fresh Windows isn't entirely ready for modern development, but all the tools you need are available. A good terminal, popular bash tools, Git, a decent package manager - when properly setup, modern development on Windows can be a lot of fun. In particular, this document outlines how to configure your Windows in such a way that it can easily handle most development tasks usually run on a Mac OS X or a Linux distro.
☝️ While Bash on Windows is still in development, it's an amazing tool that can make development a bit easier - especially when you're dealing with Bash scripts, Ruby, or Ubuntu binaries. I would currently (May 2016) not recommend it as a replacement for Git, Node, or Go - mostly because those tools are already pretty performant on Windows itself. However, they run just fine in Bash, so if you feel like moving most of your development over, go for it. Here's the how-to:
- Ensure that you're running Windows 10 Anniversary Update (build 14311 and up)
- Enable Developer Mode (Settings - Update & security > For developers)
- Search for “Windows Features” and choose “Turn Windows features on or off” and enable Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta).
- To get Bash installed, open Command Prompt and type “bash”
Below, you can see the all the things I need to actually go and work on stuff. If you like all those things, you can automate the installation thanks to the magic of Boxstarter. Simply start PowerShell as Administrator and run:
START http://boxstarter.org/package/nr/url?https://raw.githubusercontent.com/felixrieseberg/windows-development-environment/master/boxstarter
- Package Management
- Terminal
- Bash Tools
- Node.js
- npm
- Git
- Atom, Sublime, VS Code
- Ruby
- Go
- Python
- DevOps: VirtualBox, Vagrant, Docker
- Basic Tools
Chocolatey is a powerful package manager for Windows, working sort of like apt-get or homebrew. Let's get that first. Fire up CMD.exe as Administrator and run:
@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin
Once done, you can install packages by running cinst (short for choco install). Most packages below will be installed with Chocolatey.
Windows 10 comes with OneGet, a universal package manager that can use Chocolatey to find and install packages. To install, run:
Register-PackageSource -Name chocolatey -Location http://chocolatey.org/api/v2 -Provider PSModule -Trusted -Verbose
Once done, you can look for all Chrome packages by typing Find-Package -Name Chrome or install it by typing Install-Package -Name GoogleChrome.
The PowerShell in Windows 10 got a bunch of upgrades, but it's even better if used with CMDer, a powerful Console Emulator. Install with:
cinst cmder -pre
Even if you don't want to use CMDer, you should enable your PowerShell to execute scripts. You're a developer - the terminal is your friend.
Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Scope CurrentUser
If you're coming from a Unix machine, you might miss commands like curl, diff, grep and many other. Gow is your friend - it's a collection of a 100+ famous Unix tools recompiled for Windows.
cinst Gow
A bunch of tools are powered by Node and installed via npm. This applies to you even if you don't care about Node development. If you want to install tools for React, Azure, TypeScript, or Cordova, you'll need this.
cinst nodejs.install
While we're at it, we should also install PhantomJS, a popular headless WebKit with JavaScript API, used by a bunch of testing tools for browser tech.
cinst phantomjs
You just installed Node, which means that you also installed a slightly outdated version of npm. npm@3 is currently in development and offers a bunch of benefits for Windows users. You probably want to upgrade to npm@3.
npm install -g npm-windows-upgrade
npm-windows-upgrade
Obviously. If you want Git to be able to save credentials (so you don't have to enter SSH keys / passwords every single time you do anything), also install the Git Credential Manager for Windows.
cinst git.install
cinst poshgit
# Restart PowerShell / CMDer before moving on - or run
$env:Path = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path","Machine") + ";" + [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path","User")
cinst Git-Credential-Manager-for-Windows
cinst github
If you're using Mercurial or Subversion, install with:
cinst subversion
cinst mercurial
I won't join the war debating which editor is the best, but if you're looking for an editor and not a full IDE, chances are that you'll end up using one of those three.
cinst SublimeText3
cinst sublimetext3-contextmenu
cinst SublimeText3.PackageControl
cinst SublimeText3.PowershellAlias
cinst Atom
cinst visualstudiocode
If you already own Visual Studio, you should obviously install the version you bought with your precious money. If you don't, do know that Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition is free (for most people).
cinst visualstudio2015community
Even if you don't care about Ruby at all, bear in mind that it's preinstalled on OS X (and easy to install on Unix), so many dev tools might be trying to leverage it. For example, GitHub pages are compiled using Jekyll - if you want to get in on that, install Ruby.
cinst ruby
cinst ruby.devkit
Sure, why not.
cinst golang
Python is a complex world with a bunch of flavors, but Python 3, pip, and easy_install should have you prepared for most things.
cinst python
cinst pip
cinst easy.install
This stuff is really only relevant if you're interested in DevOps - but if you are, you should probably install the stuff below. It's not likely that you need any of the things below unless you're directly working with it, because none of those things are expected to be installed on a Unix machine.
If you want to run Docker machines and images, you might not need VirtualBox. In fact, installing VirtualBox on your system isn't always the best idea, given that it messes with a few system components.
Docker just released a beta version for OS X and Windows that no longer requires VirtualBox to be installed - and instead uses the default Hypervisor that comes with the operating system (on Windows, that's Hyper-V). You can read more about the beta over on Docker's blog.
However, if you want the old VirtualBox route, go and install that stuff with:
cinst virtualbox
cinst virtualbox.extensionpack
cinst vagrant
If you installed CMDer or Gow as indicated above, you're already set - simply run ssh from CMD, CMDer, or PowerShell. If you didn't, use the official Microsoft port of OpenSSH:
cinst win32-openssh
Super duper useful if you're working with Azure at all.
npm install -g azure-cli
Super duper useful if you're working with Amazon Web Services at all.
cinst awscli
cinst awstools.powershell
You'll recognize many of these names. Nothing here is crazy unique, it's just stuff you probably want installed to have a well-running machine.
cinst vlc
cinst GoogleChrome
cinst 7zip.install
cinst sysinternals
cinst DotNet3.5
If you're not running Windows 10, also install:
cinst DotNet4.0 -- not needed on windows 8
cinst DotNet4.5 -- not needed on windows 10
cinst PowerShell -- not needed on windows 10