howdoi/docs/windows-contributing.md

Setting up a Windows Development environment

Howdoi can be used on Windows, MacOS and Linux etc. But the development environment can only be set up in a Linux or Mac. To set up the development environment in Windows, follow the following steps:

Install WSL

WSL is Windows Subsystem for Linux. It offers Linux interoperability in Windows and allows users to set up a virtual environment.

If you do not have WSL set up, follow the steps in this tutorial

Setting up the virtual environment

After setting up WSL, go to the directory where you want to set up Howdoi. Open the Command Prompt here and enter the following to enter the WSL environment.

bash 

Now you are using the Linux-compatible kernel on Windows and can set up a virtual environment.

Clone the git repository

$ git clone https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi.git 

Setup and activate a virtual environment:

$ python3 -m venv .venv 
$ source .venv/bin/activate 

Make sure you have pip installed, if not, enter:

$ sudo apt install python3-pip 

Go to the project directory and install requirements:

$ cd howdoi 
$ pip install -r requirements.txt 

if howdoi does not process queries after this command, make sure your PATH variables for Python and Pip are set correctly in Windows environment variables.

Test run

Check to see if everything has been set-up correctly:

pip install howdoi 
howdoi  print hello world