Note:
If you 1) primarily work on macOS or Linux and just want to test a build on Windows; 2) have WSL installed, you don't need to follow these steps. You can simply create an unpackaged Windows build on your main system/WSL with app/scripts/dir_build -p w
and run the application in app/staging/
from Windows.
Instructions for building the Zotero desktop app assume a POSIX-compliant system capable of handling symbolic links. These instructions will work out-of-the box on most Linux and macOS systems, but Windows requires a few extra steps.
export CYGWIN="winsymlinks:nativestrict"
git clone --config core.symlinks=true --no-checkout https://github.com/zotero/zotero zotero-client
cd zotero-client git checkout HEAD package.json package-lock.json npm install
git checkout -f HEAD git submodule update --init --recursive
Note: If you are seeing here errors of the form “error: unable to create symlink […]: Operation not permitted” then you are not running Cygwin as an administrator (see step 2 above).
rcedit
, which is an additional build dependency on Windows:app/scripts/fetch_rcedit
app/scripts/build_and_run -r
, as explained on Building the Zotero Desktop AppThis error is caused by the Cygwin shell misinterpreting Windows line endings in the Node executable. Rerun the Cygwin installer, add the “dos2unix” package, then run:
dos2unix "$(which npm)" "$(which npx)"