Setup Solana BPF Toolchain on Windows

How to setup for the Solana Pathway on Windows

The Rust BPF toolchain is not available for Windows. This means that compiling Solana programs cannot be performed in a Windows development environment. The following software is required to set up and complete the Solana Pathway on a computer running the Microsoft Windows operating system:

• Docker Desktop

• Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Install Docker Desktop

Docker Setup for Windows

Install WSL on Windows

Windows 10 Home machines must meet the following requirements to install Docker Desktop:

• Install Windows 10, version 1903 or higher.

• The following hardware prerequisites are required to successfully run WSL2 on Windows 10 Home:

  • 64 bit processor with Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)

  • 4GB system RAM

  • BIOS-level hardware virtualization support must be enabled in the BIOS settings. For more information, refer to the Virtualization troubleshooting topic.

• Enable the WSL2 feature on Windows. For detailed instructions, refer to the Microsoft documentation.

• Download and install the Linux kernel update package.

Setup the Solana ecosystem

To access the filesystem of your installed Linux distribution for WSL :

• Run the command wsl from a cmd.exe or PowerShell terminal. Once you have logged in, install the Solana CLI with the command: sh -c "$(curl -sSfL https://release.solana.com/v1.7.11/install)"
• It is also important to make sure your PATH in the WSL environment includes the location of the Solana release you have installed, such as :PATH="~/.local/share/solana/install/active_release/bin:$PATH"

• More information on viewing and setting the PATH in Linux is available here.

Once WSL is installed and you can access it through the Windows command prompt, you can continue to follow the setup instructions for the Rust toolchain in the Solana Pathway. This will enable you to compile Solana programs on a computer running Microsoft Windows, within the WSL environment.

Happy building! 😁