docs[troubleshooting]: add Windows specific troubleshooting section

[devkhan]

While Windows isn't officially supported, some users might want to run Tutor on Windows. This section provides some tips and tricks to help you troubleshoot common issues. These are from my personal experiences and struggle to get local development working on Windows.

This originated from a conversation on Slack with @kdmccormick.

[Danyal-Faheem]

I think these docs should be placed under the System Administration section in the Tutorials page.

[devkhan]

Doesn't Troubleshooting makes more sense as it's actually about solving Windows specific issues? Sys admin seems more like targeted towards people running production instances, but the target audience of this section are devs mainly.

[Danyal-Faheem]

Doesn't Troubleshooting makes more sense as it's actually about solving Windows specific issues?

The troubleshooting section defines specific issues and how to resolve them. Since this is more of a generic guide on how to use Windows for development purposes, it doesn't make sense for it to be under troubleshooting unless we define a specific issue that occurs while working on Windows and provide a solution for that.

There is already a guide in the sys admin section on how to run Tutor on Arm64 systems. A guide for how to run and develop on Windows should fit in there.

[devkhan]

Okay, I'll move it there.

[Danyal-Faheem]

Hi @devkhan, I tried to follow this tutorial and it works perfectly fine when using it through WSL2 as you mentioned.

However, I was unable to get it working when running through Windows. Here are the steps I followed:

1. Install tutor 18.1.1 on Windows and WSL2 seperately.
2. Run tutor images build openedx-dev from WSL2.
3. Clone edx-platform on windows. Run tutor mounts add path-to-edx-platform on windows.
4. Run tutor dev launch --skip-build.

However, this would fail for me at the npm run build-dev step during the initialization process. It would throw multiple file/module not found errors likely related to symlinks as you have mentioned.

I then tried this on Tutor 17.0.5 as that utilized paver scripts instead and that would fail for me as well with the same error.

Can you let me know if I'm doing something wrong in this process?

[DawoudSheraz]

@devkhan Hi, can you follow up on comments left by Danyal, please? Thanks

[devkhan]

@Danyal-Faheem Apologies, I was busy with work for a while. Finally getting around to this.

I just tried it again with the same steps, and it seems to work fine for me. Here's my setup:

• tutor v18 in both WSL and Windows
• WSL has no mounts, running tutor images build openedx-dev works in WSL in the mounted directory
• Windows tutor has the mount set to the cloned repo
• running tutor dev launch --skip-build works on Windows

Although, only the open-release/redwood.master branch work for me, master fails with ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'nh3'. But I'm guessing that's a different issue.

I'll do a clean setup and report back if I'm missing some key step in the process.

Can you share the exact config if possible? Or I can reach out to you on Slack to fully understand the issue?

[Danyal-Faheem]

Hi @devkhan.

Yeah sure, we can discuss it further on the openedx slack. I'll ping you there.

[DawoudSheraz]

@devkhan Any updates on this PR? Thank you