actual/docs/contributing/windows.md

Building on Windows

Many of the build scripts are bash scripts and not natively invokable in Windows. To solve this, you can build the project using Git Bash.

1. Install Git & Git Bash for Windows
2. Ensure you have activated Developer Mode
3. Install Node v16.x (latest version 17.x does not work due to issue with crypto package)
4. Clone this repo
5. Using Git Bash (run as administrator), change to the root of this repo
6. From inside the bash shell, run yarn install
7. From still inside the shell, run yarn start:browser
8. Open your browser to http://localhost:3001

How to build the Electron app on Windows

1. Follow steps 1 - 6 above.
2. Run yarn start. If you get an error about bundle.desktop.js, just and rerun yarn start.
3. If you get an error from electron, run yarn rebuild-electron and rerun yarn start;

Errors

rsync: command not found

If you run into this error, you will need to install the rsync binary to Git Bash. Follow the directions here.

ln: failed to create symbolic link '../../desktop-client/public/kcab': Operation not permitted

Bash needs to be run as administrator.