anki/docs/windows.md

Windows

Requirements

Windows:

You must be running 64 bit Windows 10, version 1703 or newer.

The build system requires Developer Mode to be enabled.

Visual Studio:

Visual Studio 2022 was released in Nov 2021. Anki does not support it yet. You will need to download 2019 instead. Microsoft will push you towards 2022 on the Visual Studio website; you'll need to locate "older downloads", then log in with a free Microsoft account and search for "Build Tools for Visual Studio 2019 (version 16.11)".

Once you've downloaded the installer, open it, and select "Desktop Development with C++" on the left, leaving the options shown on the right as is.

MSYS:

Install msys2 into the default folder location.

After installation completes, run msys2, and run the following command:

$ pacman -S git

If you have native Windows apps relying on Git, e.g. the PowerShell extension posh-git, you may want to install Git for Windows and put it on the path instead, as msys Git may cause issues with them.

Bazel:

Use Start>Run to open PowerShell. Create a folder to store Bazel and its working data. Anki's build scripts expect to find it in \bazel on the same drive as the source folder.

PS> mkdir \bazel
PS> cd \bazel

Then grab Bazelisk:

PS> \msys64\usr\bin\curl -L https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazelisk/releases/download/v1.10.1/bazelisk-windows-amd64.exe -o bazel.exe

Source folder:

Anki's source files do not need to be in a specific location other than on the same drive as \bazel, but it's best to avoid long paths, as they can cause problems.

Running Anki during development

Open PowerShell and change to the top level of Anki's source folder, then run

.\run

This will build Anki and run it in place.

The first build will take a while, as it downloads and builds a bunch of dependencies. When the build is complete, Anki will automatically start.

To play and record audio, mpv.exe and lame.exe must be on the path.

Optimized builds

The .\run command will create a non-optimized build by default. This is faster to compile, but will mean Anki will run considerably slower.

To run Anki in optimized mode, use:

.\tools\runopt

Stale TS Files

The build process may break when .ts files are removed or renamed on Windows. If you're tracking Anki's development and you run into a TS build error, try the following:

bazel run tools:cleanup_js

More

For info on running tests, building wheels and so on, please see Development.

When you run a script like .\run, MSYS and bazel will automatically be added to the path, and Bazel will be configured to output build products into \bazel\anki. If you want to directly invoke bazel before having run any of the .bat files in this repo, please run tools\setup-env first.

However, this will not work in PowerShell, as .bat files are executed in a subprocess. To invoke bazel scripts, you will have to adjust your session path manually. One option is to create a script that sets up your Anki development environment for you. Here is an example:

# put bazel and msys on path
$env:PATH = "c:\bazel;c:\msys64\usr\bin;$env:PATH"
# change working directory to anki root
Set-Location C:\code\anki
# open VSC
code .
# open powershell 7
pwsh