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Development Environment Setup for Windows

Josh Greig edited this page Mar 14, 2017 · 34 revisions

This article is intended to help people set up new personal computers that use Windows for work on the project.

Install WAMP.

  1. Go to the "Download" section on http://www.wampserver.com/en/ and download either the 64 bit or 32 bit version.
  2. Use only default settings wherever possible in the installer to keep things simple and easy to remember. If you're forced to add a non-empty password, keep it really simple like 1234 since the password may be readable by others anyway if you get stuck.

If you run into errors about missing vc dll files, install the Visual Studio runtimes such as http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679. You can find them in the dialog on http://www.wampserver.com/en/ where you downloaded the installer.

This step will be finished when you can run WAMP, see it go red, orange, and finally green.

Upgrade PHP to version 7 or later.

  1. Open a terminal and run 'php -v' to see if you have 7 or later. If it says 7.0 or 7.1, proceed to the next step. 5.6 is too old.

Check if you have a folder like C:\wamp\bin\php\php7.0.10 with your wamp installation. If you have a directory for 7 or later, add it to your PATH environment variable.


If you don't have a directory for php 7 or later, download a zip from http://windows.php.net/qa/. Extracting to a subdirectory of C:\wamp\bin\php would be good. Update your PATH environment variable to include your new directory containing php.exe.


This step is complete when you can open a terminal/console window, type 'php -v' and see 7 or later.

If you run into a lot of problems getting git installed and working from command line in Windows, the following video will show the steps in more detail for installing git bash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=albr1o7Z1nw


Before calling this step complete, you should be able to open a terminal/cmd window and run 'git -v' without seeing an unrecognized command message.

Clone the repository on your laptop. Pick a directory and add your repository. The following command sequence should work.


  1. cd c:/
  2. mkdir accesslocator
  3. cd accesslocator
  4. git clone https://github.com/hhaccessibility/hhaccessibility.github.io.git

Install npm.

  1. Consider if you're using 64 bit windows or not and pick the appropriate installer from https://nodejs.org/en/download/

Install gulp.

  1. The following commands should work.

  1. cd c:\accesslocator\hhaccessibility.github.io\app

  2. npm install

  3. npm install -g gulp-cli

  4. npm install gulp

  5. Create a MySQL database named hhaccessibility. You can do this using phpmyadmin in a web browser while running WAMP installation or using the mysql command in a terminal.

Install composer.

  1. Download the installer executable from https://getcomposer.org/download/ and run it.
  2. Reopen a command window and test that the "composer" command is recognized.
  3. Run "composer install".
  4. Copy a .env file you should have received in an email to your hhaccessibility.github.io\app directory. You may need to use a terminal/console to rename env to .env after pasting the file due to Explorer not thinking it is valid to create a file named ".env".

Test that everything worked.

  1. cd c:\accesslocator\hhaccessibility.github.io\app
  2. gulp
  3. php artisan serve
  4. Hit CTRL and C or CTRL and x at the same time to stop the server.
  5. php artisan migrate
  6. php artisan db:seed

For more detail on what those commands do and mean, consult app\README.md.

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