Lab 1 Setup: Windows

A video walkthrough for this guide is available at https://youtu.be/xEO4SOjmUOw. The guide has been reorganized a bit since I made this video (bleh), but all the steps are the same.

A. Install Java

  1. The first thing to do is install the Java 9 SDK. Head over to the Oracle website, and click the “Download” button for the JDK, annotated with purple arrows in the image below: Oracle Website
  2. On the following page, find the download section entitled “Java SE Development Kit 9.0.1” (or a higher version number, if this is out of date) and agree to the license. Then proceed to download the binary file for your operating system. Java Agreement
  3. Run the install file and follow the prompts to install Java onto your computer. It’s OK to select all of the default options. This may take several minutes, and it may seem to pause for a long time before completing. For me (Josh), it got stuck at the last 5% for at least three minutes before finally completing.

B. Everything Else

  1. Before you start, you should have installed Java as described in lab 1 setup.

  2. Install Python 3. We might not end up using Python in this course, but it’s handy to have just in case. The Python installer will ask if you want to add Python to your system’s path. You should say yes. python_path

  3. Install git. Head to http://git-scm.com/download/ and download the Git for Windows installer. When you run the installer, you’ll be faced with many options. Unlike everything else, we do not recommend the default options. Instead, you should choose the options listed below. Git Download

    1. Checking Windows Explorer integration will let you do git things upon right-clicking a file or folder, more specifically, run Git Bash and the Git GUI respectively. This is not required, but might be handy. Git Installation 1

    2. Next we’ll select a default Git Bash. Unless you’ve used vim before, we strongly recommend using nano instead. Git Installation 2

    3. Git Bash is a bash shell with built-in git support and lets you use some MinGW/Linux tools. If you already know what bash is and have a preferred terminal, you’re welcome to use that instead. Using Git from Git Bash is the recommended option. Git Installation 2

    4. Windows and Unix based systems use different things to denote line endings in files. Use the recommended option (the first one) to avoid seemingly mysterious bugs down the road. Git Installation 3

    5. This option lets you pick between two different “terminal emulators.” This will deeply affect the aesthetics of your working environment, and IMO MinTTY is much better. Our official directions assume you choose MinTTY, so if you pick the other option, you’re on your own. One word of warning: if you want to run python in interactive mode using git bash, you need to either run it as winpty python or python -i instead of just typing python. Git Installation 4

  4. Lastly, we’ll set up some environment variables. Environment variables are variables available to the operating system. For example, whenever you try to run a program from the terminal, Windows will check the environment variable named PATH, then will look at all folders listed in that variable for the program name, and if it finds that program in any of those places, it’ll run the program. The two environment variables we’ll set are PATH and JAVA_HOME. 1. Let’s start by seeing why we need to do this. Open up a git bash terminal (using the start menu) and you should see something like this pop up: Git Bash This prompt is awaiting our command. If we enter the command javac, we should get “command not found”, as shown below: javac not found If javac actually works, then somehow javac is already in your path and you’re done with Windows setup, so you can close this page.

    2. Let’s view the current value of our PATH command line variable. To do this, enter the command echo $PATH. You should see something like the picture below. This is a colon separated list of everywhere Windows looks for programs when we try to run them. For example, when we typed javac, it first looked in /c/Users/hug/bin, then it looked in /mingw64/bin, then /usr/local/bin, all the way until it got to /usr/bin/core_perl. Since it was unable to find Java in any of these locations, it tells us it was unable to find javac.

    echo path 3. To fix this, we need to add the location of javac to our path. We’ll do this by first defining a variable called JAVA_HOME, then including a reference to JAVA_HOME in our PATH. We’ll see what we mean by this in the following steps.

    4. Use Cortana (a.k.a. Windows search) in the bottom left corner of your desktop to search for “environment”. An option should pop up as shown below called “Edit the system environment variables”. If you’re using an older version of Windows this will look slightly different: [Windows 7 picture] [Windows 8 picture]

    windows10 search 5. This should bring up something that looks like the picture below, with an “Environment Variables” button you should press.

    System Properties 6. After pressing “Environment Variables”, you should be given a list of environment variables. The picture below is for Windows 10, but Windows 7 and 8 should look similar. Click the “New” button:

    New Variable 7. Under “Variable name”, enter “JAVA_HOME” with an underscore. Under “Variable value”, enter the path where you installed the java JDK. On my computer, this is: “C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-9.0.1”. It is important that the directory name contains jdk and not jre (jre does not include javac!). You should end up with something like:

    JAVA Home 8. Now scroll down to the existing Path variable in the list. Click on it, then click edit.

    New variable 9. You’ll see all the directories in the path listed. If you’re on an older version of Windows, it’ll be on one big ugly line. In Windows 10, however, it’ll look nice, as shown below. On Windows 10, click “New”, and enter exactly %JAVA_HOME%\bin in the new box. On older versions, add %JAVA_HOME%\bin; with a semicolon to the beginning of the line. This tells Windows to look in the subfolder of bin under JAVA_HOME any time you try to run any programs. Click OK.

    After adding JAVA_HOME 10. Close all terminal windows. Open a new Git Bash terminal window, and try javac again. This time it should work. If it does not, try printing out your path (using what we did in step 2) above, and confirming that your environment variable was properly set. If you’re still having trouble, post to Piazza.