Watchman: How do I install Watchman on windows?

[guledali]

Maybe I'm not technical enough to understand the user-guide for installing on windows machine

Extract the zip file and make sure that watchman.exe is located in a directory that is in your PATH

The first part I understand zip the file however the second part I don't understand
located in a directory that is in your PATH

What does it mean? Why not just release it as a npm module that you can install cli globally on your machine. Doing stuff manually like this located in a directory that is in your PATH does not make any sense it just doesn't. It's not user-friendly

Why I'm asking this is that there are a lot of packages/plugins that rely on this or build on top of it like GraphQL language service or the flow-language-server.

[wez]

Windows support is still relatively new (it is still considered beta), so we know we have scope for improvement. Why not distribute via npm? Watchman is used in a lot more places than the javascript world, and has a more complex overall deployment and configuration than is reasonable to expect to encode into an npm package.

This wikipedia entry explains the PATH concept in computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATH_(variable)

[guledali]

@wez I just want to start with saying thanks for the quick reply, I went trough the wikipedia link that you provided https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PATH_(variable)

This is what I'm trying to do

Extract the zip file and make sure that watchman.exe is located in a directory that is in your PATH.

It would be easier if you guys provided more clear instructions maybe even images. So I should put the file watchman.exe in my PATH. Whats my PATH and how do I find it out. I'm guessing it's a directory I'm suppose to put the file in it. What directory is it!

_Anyone on a windows machine that can show how to do it?_

[wez]

@guledali I'm hesistant to suggest things because I think you need to expand your knowledge a bit more before you go further; watchman has some complexities and if you're not comfortable with PATH you're likely going to have a very hard time if anything goes wrong. Watchman is targeted primarily at folks that have to deal with very large scale directories and is thus what I'd categorize as software for experienced systems engineers to install and administer. We don't currently have an easy flow on windows because that is not a priority for us at this time.

[guledali]

@wez Update the docs with this information

Straight from watchman docs:

Extract the zip file and make sure that watchman.exe is located in a directory that is in your PATH.

Quick instructions for how the quickest way to do it:

1. So you put watchman directory in C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\ (so watchman.exe is in C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\watchman\watchman.exe)
2. Open PowerShell as Administrator
3. Add directory to PATH env variable by using setx path "%path%;C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\watchman"
4. You can check that it was added: $ENV:PATH
5. And that watchman is found: watchman -v

That should be it more information visit this thread!
https://github.com/prisma/vscode-graphql/issues/62#issuecomment-418931608

[dmxt]

@guledali I always thought that any folder (except those few restricted system folders) can be a PATH ~ i.e you add it to the env. variables afterward regardless. I have C:\cmder\bin\ as my path for the cmder bin, for instance.

[Slapbox]

Where does one get this fabled Windows zip of Watchman...?

• Not in the latest release, where the official documentation links
• Not in the 4.9.0 release
• Not in any other 4.x release

[fanzeyi]

@Slapbox If the Windows build is not available in the latest release, please check previous releases. We have a weekly auto release system. Sometime when the build on a certain platform fails for various reasons (build failure or test failures), it will skip publishing for that platform for that release.

[Slapbox]

Thanks a lot @fanzeyi!

I jumped around through a lot of releases but I guess I didn't click literally the second one. In retrospect it's really obvious which have Windows builds because some have 4 assets and others have 5. :facepalm:

Thanks again!