Introduction

A brief genesis of this document

This document is initiated by @thedavid, stating his expectations as:

What is working? How developer experience should “feel”. Startup and installation times. Etc. Need to define the overall vision for Redwood experience on Windows, which, importantly, will set constraints as much as it sets benchmarks + expectations.

Note: I suggest we focus this specifically on “Developing Redwood Projects on Windows” and not “Developing the Redwood Framework on Windows”. For the latter, I believe we have good-enough instructions within the Contributing docs. Will defer to Tobbe.

I also found a 6-7 months old issues:

• How to setup debugging in VSCode
• Add option --inspect dev-server

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Editorial

Rather than presenting a long list of various options to "simulate" Linux on Windows, this document is written for developers that are interested in RedwoodJS recommendations for the development environment on the Windows platform, shown below:

• Leave all platform dependency issues to standard Javascript development tools (NodeJS, NPM/Yarn) and use Redwood CLI with a choice of several native "terminals" (CMD.EXE, cmder, Windows Terminal). See section Terminals for more information on this topic, including the information on What's the difference between a console, a terminal, and a shell?.

• In addition to NodeJS, NPM/Yarn, use VSCode as your principal tool. This way you do not need to depend on any text editor nor console, and you could use the identical tools set on all three platforms. Even more, your VSCode created application can be debugged on other supported platforms - a feature that no other approach will facilitate, not even WSL/WSL2.

• Since it is also likely that Windows platform using developers may still use tools other than the VSCode family of tools, I will also cover the following:

  • Get Started With Running JavaScript In The Console
  • Using Visual Studio to Debug JavaScript via Windows Script Host (WSH)
  • vscode-js-debug
  • others based on feedback from this article

Note: see RedwoodJS and VSCode for more information explaining that preference

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