Hi, everyone.
This is to document my experience installing Frontier on Windows. If you've gone through this and can add some insight, please do. I am technically proficient under Linux, but I'm having unrelated technical problems there so I'm trying this out on a Windows machine. I've encountered a few confusing issues which I'd like to record here to help the developers see it from this angle.
(I'm not here to bitch, by the way. Great work, guys. Just informing you of what happened.)
1) "Installation instructions for Windows" begins with "Installing from Chocolatey". What is chocolatey? Installation instructions for chocolatey were not that easy to find, and requires pasting a
choice of text commands into a
choice of shells.
2) Running "choco install geth-stable" seemed to work but the obvious next command, "geth", is "not recognised as an internal or external command." You have to cd to where chocolatey installed it (not an obvious location, not even within Program Files).
3) Before I tried hunting down the installation, I tried installing alethzero. This fails because it depends on 7zip yet does not install 7zip as a dependency. When running, it complains that libcurl is missing.
4) Back to the original plan, I am now in the middle of multiple sets of instructions for various things and have to go back to the blog post to get my bearings.
5) mk_genesis_block.py could and should be included in the chocolatey package
6) "You now need to install the pybitcointools" but the instructions after that appear to be for installing "bitcoin". After running "pip install bitcoin", have I installed pybitcointools? "pybitcointools is not recognised as an internal or external command."
7) Wait, I have to build from git now? Didn't I install geth in step 2?
8) These instructions seem to have drifted into a linux-only mode. Where are all these directories under Windows?
9) I'm waiting for the hash of block #1028201but
http://ether.fund/explorer seems to be saying we're at block 1507 at the moment.
10) Well, I may as well do a dry run... python mk_genesis_block.py --extradata 12345
File "mk_genesis_block.py", line 293
print json.dumps(evaluate(), ident=4)
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
-------------------------------------------------------
Has anyone here actually managed to get all this working on Windows? The instructions seem incomplete, I'd appreciate any help filling out the gaps. Am I expected to change my PATH, for example? If I open a brand new command prompt after installing everything, what should I be doing to run these programs? Does my working directory matter?
Thanks for reading.
Comments
Installing cpp-ethereum on Windows
Using the chocolatey package
- https://github.com/ethereum/cpp-ethereum/wiki/Installing-clients
Not sure what to do after following those instructions either.
I cannot generate the genesis block.
I did the ETH for Windows command line install instructions and it downloaded, asked if I wanted to create paths, and offered to add an icon on my desktop. It completed...Then Nothing. I did a search on my entire computer and all I see is old files from previously working on getting this going and there is NO ICON. Any ideas?
"choco install geth-stable -version 1.0.0.0" into elevated command will do it
I'm using win 7 and the files are here
C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\geth-stable
you run a command line and you can interact with geth from there
currently I cant do anything though because I'm stuck at the python script to generate the genesis. Ive gone over the text so many times and I can only conclude there are no windows instructions regarding that process. The only instructions is to install python and that pip is built into it so don't worry.
install bitcoin
i think thi'l be the issue. Will report if I have success or otherwise.
no gui
ill find the command lists for you.
so for example you might try
geth version
to get the version info
As for the api errors, I've seen eslwhere that others have fixed this by running it using the --insight switch which will use the private Ethereum servers instead of Blockchain.info.
File "mk_genesis_block.py", line 293
print json.dumps(evaluate(), indent=4)
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
then you can install bitcoin though I don't know if its relevant r not since it changed nothing for me.
The first one
File "mk_genesis_block.py", line 293
print json.dumps(evaluate(), ident=4)
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
------------------------------
Instead of print the json.dumps directly, I rewrote it in 2 lines:
jsonStr = json.dumps(evaluate(), indent=4)
print(jsonStr)
Second one is the hex decode of the block hash:
EXTRADATA = (d[2:] if d[:2] == '0x' else d).decode('hex')
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'
-------------------------------------------
The solution is sneaky. I decode the hash by myself and replace the code:
EXTRADATA = decoded_hash_block
I will try to use insight. seems the script can't connect to blockchain.info
https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.10/python-2.7.10.msi