Windows

The Dendron VSCode extension is built in TypeScript and uses a lot of JavaScript tooling to build and compile, and does not always play nice with Windows.

Here are some of the things to look out for:

yarn

The current version of yarn failsyarn-8555 with npm v7. Downgrading to npm v6 is the only known workaround:

npm i -g npm@^6.14.11

git

Most of the Dendron developers use Mac or Linux, so the file endings and permissions are not the same. After you build Dendron, git will pick up a lot of file changes that don't actually exist diff.

In order to fix this (preferably do this before building Dendron):

Create a .gitattributes file in the root of the Dendron repo and add * text=auto lineendings
run git config --add core.filemode false on the repo chmod

If you are still seeing blank changes in git run:

git add --renormalize . diff (yes there is a single dot at the end of the command.)

watch script

Dendron has a watch.sh script which will continuously compile all dependencies while you are developing. This is useful, but windows does not run shell scripts natively...

The easiest way to run shell scripts on Windows is to use git BASHgit gitbash, which gets automatically installed, when you install git for windows. (It should also already be on your PATH.)

Open git BASH inside the Dendron repo and run the script:

./bootstrap/scripts/watch.sh

OpenSSL issues

You may see some errors like this during the build:

Error: error:0308010C:digital envelope routines::unsupported
    at new Hash (node:internal/crypto/hash:67:19)
    at Object.createHash (node:crypto:130:10)
    at BulkUpdateDecorator.hashFactory (C:\Users\kaan\Projects\dendron\packages\dendron-next-server\node_modules\next\dist\compiled\webpack\bundle5.js:138971:18)
    at BulkUpdateDecorator.update (C:\Users\kaan\Projects\dendron\packages\dendron-next-server\node_modules\next\dist\compiled\webpack\bundle5.js:138872:50)
    at C:\Users\kaan\Projects\dendron\packages\dendron-next-server\node_modules\next\dist\compiled\webpack\bundle5.js:59321:9
    at processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:83:21)
    at runNextTicks (node:internal/process/task_queues:65:3)
    at processImmediate (node:internal/timers:444:9) {
  opensslErrorStack: [ 'error:03000086:digital envelope routines::initialization error' ],
  library: 'digital envelope routines',
  reason: 'unsupported',
  code: 'ERR_OSSL_EVP_UNSUPPORTED'
}

This is caused by an old OpenSSL configuration (or version) that Git for Windows, or something else you installed, ships with. To work around this, we need to tell NodeJS to use a legacy OpenSSL.

Before running the build, run: export NODE_OPTIONS=--openssl-legacy-provider

Footnotes