Inaturalist development setup for windows 10

I want to set up development environment setup for inaturalist in windows 10. I have gone through contributing guide https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/wiki/Development-Setup-Guide , but for windows operating systems , no instuctions are given. Please Help me to setup environment in windows 10.

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Welcome to the community!

I was hoping someone more experienced could provide clarification. I am not a Ruby developer, and have not tried to set up an environment for the iNaturalist app.

But it seems to me that the easiest way to install such an environment on Windows is with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Actually, Homebrew has no native installation method on Windows, but it is installed on Linux (including WSL) with a single terminal command. Docker on Windows also uses WSL2 as a default backend.

So even on Windows, it will actually be a Linux environment. And the only difference in the guide will be in the “Basic Dependencies” section - you will need to select the installation options for Linux, not Mac. Further terminal commands will be the same.

So, the first necessary step on Windows would probably be to install one of the most well-known and well-supported distributions (like Ubuntu or Debian) using WSL2. It’s also possible to install them natively - perhaps this will help avoid some virtualization difficulties (I’m not sure, since I haven’t tried it).

Also, I doubt iNaturalist servers use Windows as the operating system. It’s more likely a Unix-like environment there - Linux or something like BSD. So, the environment for running the iNaturalist app on Linux would be the closest to the real thing.

I hope these thoughts can be useful to you.

@agoranomos set up a dev environment on Win 10 and Ubuntu on Virtualbox VM and offered some guidance and scripts here: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/contributing-to-the-inaturalist-codebase/26081.

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