How to setup your Windows PC for Substrate Development

I have found many new Substrate developers having trouble with setting up Substrate development environment on their Windows Machine. Personally when I had started developing on Substrate I was using the ‘Command Prompt’ or ‘Powershell’ to interact with my development node, but I quickly ran into issues. First, when using the ‘curl’ command to send some json to the node using RPC, it gives all sorts of errors. Also both of them are inconsistent when executing commands, as some commands worked one day, but next day they didn’t.

So the answer is to use ‘Windows Subsystem for Linux’ and accessing it through Visual Studio Code. Here are the following steps.

Step 1: Install Visual Studio Code

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/windows

Step 2: Install or Enable WSL

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

Step 3: Install Ubuntu 20.04 from Microsoft Store

https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/p/ubuntu-2004-lts/9n6svws3rx71#activetab=pivot:overviewtab

Step 4: Access WSL from VSCode

a) Click on Terminal in the VSCode Toolbar

b) Select Ubuntu 20.04 WSL from the Terminal Box Opened

Step 5: Install Rust and other dependencies

In the WSL terminal opened in VSCode, execute the following commands

# Dependencies
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y git clang curl libssl-dev llvm libudev-dev
#Rust Installation
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
source ~/.cargo/env
source ~/.cargo/env
rustup default stable
rustup update
rustup update nightly
rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown --toolchain nightly

Step 6: You are now free to experiment with the Substrate Node Templates on your Windows PC using WSL

git clone https://github.com/substrate-developer-hub/substrate-node-template

Bramble is also using Substrate for developing its blockchain. Click on the Discord link to connect with us.