win-cross-dev

Cross Platform Development Setup for Windows

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Table of Contents

• Enhancing PowerShell with Scoop
• Enabling the Linux Subsystem for Windows
• EOL
• Configure Git
• Configure IDE
• Node Modules

Enhancing PowerShell with Scoop

Scoop is a command line installer for Windows that runs on top of the PowerShell. You could say it is like Homebrew but for Windows. The nice thing is that it installs and manages windows applications and ported Linux tools all in your user environment. It also makes your interaction with PowerShell identical if not very close to a Linux bash shell.

Prerequisites

• PowerShell 5 or later
• .NET Framework 4.5 or later*

Installation

• Open Windows PowerShell
• Run Invoke-Expression (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://get.scoop.sh')
• or shorter command iwr -useb get.scoop.sh | iex

If you experience some errors running the above command then try changing the execution policy

• Run Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -scope CurrentUser

If you still encounter errors then try browsing Scoop.sh's issues page on github, or contact your IT Administrator if your machine is managed.

Next ...

• Add the scoop extras bucket to access more apps

scoop install git
scoop bucket add extras https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop-extras.git

• Windows now comes with builtin ssh native binary. You can enable it by viewing this guide
• Run the following list of commands in order to install essential packages

scoop install aria2
scoop install 7zip
scoop install curl
scoop install cacert
scoop install grep
scoop install gzip
scoop install less
scoop install sudo
scoop install tar
scoop install touch
scoop install wget
scoop install which
scoop install sed
scoop install make
scoop install openssl
scoop install telnet

• There are also some interesting packages to install that contain a group of binaries for those familar with Linux command line tools

scoop install coreutils
scoop install diffutils
scoop install findutils
scoop install pciutils

• Run the following commands to make your PowerShell look awesome

scoop install concfg
scoop install pshazz

• Install essential development tools
• Note that the -g option is to install globally instead of locally only to user

scoop install -g nodejs-lts
scoop install -g yarn
scoop install -g php
scoop install -g openjdk
scoop install -g vcredist2017
scoop install -g gradle
scoop install -g docker

• Install some apps to impress your friends

scoop install cowsay
scoop install figlet

• Scoop also comes with the ability to install regular apps as well such as foobar2000 to listen to music.

You should now have a very sophisticated PowerShell terminal with a Linux like interaction and package management. Below are some essential scoop commands you will be using often.

Command	Description
cleanup	Cleanup apps by removing old versions
depends	List dependencies for an app
help	Show help for a command
install	Install apps
list	List installed apps
search	Search available apps
status	Show status and check for new app versions
uninstall	Uninstall an app
update	Update apps, or Scoop itself
which	Locate a program path

Configuring the shell further

For those who still think powershell can never look as hacky as bash or even zsh, allow me to prove you wrong:

• First, use the utility concfg we've installed previously to search for a nice theme preset:

concfg presets

• You can try all of these themes using the command below. The powershell-defaults one works great if you're not sure.

concfg import powershell-defaults

🏁 That's all we need to prettify our shell, but there is more we can do to customize the prompt using another utility we have installed called pshazz

• There are a lot of default themes built into pshazz, and it is fairly easy to create you own by running:

pshazz new mytheme

where mytheme is any name you want.

• Once you are done editing your theme's colors and custom prompt text, you can use it with the following command:

pshazz use mytheme

A theme developed by @Faultless kicks it up a notch. You can get it by downloading the JSON file:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Faultless/pshazz/master/themes/xpander.json
mv ~/xpander.json ~/pshazz/xpander.json

And then use the theme:

pshazz use xpander

Concerning the powershell font, you will need to download and install the Patched Deja Vu Sans Mono font for Powerline in order to display special characters required by some themes (e.g. pshazz, agnoster). You can use this font in powershell from the top left menu -> Defaults Menu -> Font

🏁 That's it! Your shell is now colorful almost to a fault, and the prompt has that *nix look and feel we all love.

Enabling the Linux Subsystem for Windows

Would it not be great if we literally had native Linux environment on Windows? Well it seems pigs flew! Windows 10 64bit on the Anniversary edition has a beta Linux Subsystem available. When enabled it has a full featured Linux subsystem in your local user directory with an Ubuntu bash shell. On this shell you can do all Ubuntu command-line actions such as install apps using apt-get. What is also nice is that the Windows and Linux subsystems can see and communicate with each other (filesystem and networking). This makes it ideal to run Linux only services, commands and what not without having to install a Virtual Machine.

• You must have a 64-bit version of Windows 10 Anniversary Update or later (build 1607+)
• Follow the instructions on the HowToGeek site
• When asked to create a Unix username, do so and use a 1 word name
  • It would also be wise to use the same password as your windows password, unless you want to memorize 2 different passwords
• Follow the instructions and also install the Ubuntu Font
• Once the installation is all completed you will notice the terminal has some pretty nasty flurecent colors
  • This is because it's running on the Windows filesystem and UID and GID bits are set in many places

Try the following to install the Solarized Dark theme for the terminal

cd ~
wget --no-check-certificate https://raw.githubusercontent.com/seebi/dircolors-solarized/master/dircolors.256dark
mv dircolors.256dark .dircolors
eval `dircolors ~/.dircolors`

You might want to decorate your terminal to show Git information as well since you will most likely store your git repo outside of the Linux sunsystem.

• Open the file .bashrc and replace the following code blocks

Add This

parse_git_branch() {
 git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}
if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
 PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[01;31m\]$(parse_git_branch)\[\033[00m\]\$ '
else
 PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w$(parse_git_branch)\$ '
fi
unset color_prompt force_color_prompt

In place of this

if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then
    PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ '
else
    PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '
fi
unset color_prompt force_color_prompt

Your console window should look like this

EOL

One of the most important aspect of cross-platform development is to be consistent with your EOLs in your files. The main objectives for this goal are the following:

• Use Linux style EOL '\n'
• Add EOL at the end of each file
• Use UTF-8 encoding for all text files
• Use tools to enforce these objectives

Configure Git

Git comes with 3 settings

Setting Name	Value	Description
core.autocrlf	true	Convert all LF to CRLF when checking out and committing code.
core.autocrlf	false	Disables CRLF conversion, garbage in/garbage out
core.autocrlf	input	Convert all CRLF to LF when committing code

Normally you want to set the core.autocrlf to false or input.

• When to set it to false?
  • This gives you ultimate control
  • Code editor controls EOLs for you
  • Tools such as eslint enforces Linux EOL
  • You have tools and settings that convert CRLF for you
• When to set it to input
  • Git has the last say in converting your EOL
  • Whatever happens it will always convert to Linux EOL when committing
  • It may auto-convert LF to CRLF on checkout (needs verification)
  • Code editor and tools may miss some files for enforcing Linux EOL

Configure IDE

All if not most code editors and IDEs will have an option to select what Line endings to use in your code or on newly created files.

• Set the IDE or code editor to exclusively use Linux EOL
• Set UTF-8 as the default file encoding
• Setup tools like eslint to enforce Linux EOL by flagging Windows EOL as errors

Node Modules

There are some useful modules on npm that make cross platform development much easier. Here are a few with their core uses

• cross-env
  • Use environment variables without worrying what platform you are on
• shx
  • Writing one-off unix commands that can run on multi-platforms
• npx
  • Execute npm binaries without having to specify relative location
• npm-run-all
  • Execute multuple npm scripts in a nice clean and lean way

Contributors

George Haddad 📖 💡 💻	Serge Kamel 📖 💡 🤔	Alex Allen 📖