So this is the question. Let's think about this.
When we get into the job market, not always we get the best machines to work with and to make the things we love. Having a Windows machine isn't necessarily bad news, but the machines that usually come with it, either have limitations or you end up needing more tools than the ones that Windows seems to offer. Nonetheless, many things are actually very much possible with a Windows machine. They usually just have a different shape.
I personally have more preference for Linux and Mac-OS based machines. But that's also because I don't do much professional work in C# or other .Net technologies.
This first post is a celebration of the all the things that I have learned that have gotten me through working with Windows machines through the years, in those odd occasions.
1. Environment Setup
1.1. Chocolatey
If you come from a world where you are used to using package managers, you will probably want to keep using such a mechanism. For this you can install Chocolatey
- Run Windows PowerShell with administrative rights.
- The following is on the website itself. I'm putting it here, just to summarise it:
Run
Get-ExecutionPolicy
If it returns Restricted, then run
Set-ExecutionPolicy AllSigned
or
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process
NOTE: If you end up changing policy, you need to restart your computer
- Run the installation command:
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
1.2. Install necessary software
choco install -y minikube
choco install -y virtualbox
choco install -y maven
choco install -y git
choco install -y vim
2. Install Docker
- There are multiple ways to install docker:
Docker. This is my favorite. It is very straightforward and you get docker running in no time. However, for one or another reason, you may find it difficult to do so.
Chocolatey. Using the command line with Chocolatey:
choco install -y docker
choco install -y docker-machine
choco install -y docker-desktop
docker-machine create default
docker-machine start
After this last create command, there will be an output to run an extra command. This may differ by machine and environment. Please run that.
Here is an example:
docker-machine.exe env default | Invoke-Expression
Essentially what this does is that it binds your command line to the docker environment. In this case it is default.
3. Installing Ubuntu for windows
- In order to install Ubuntu in your windows machine, there are two options.
Install Ubuntu for Windows (pre-requisite: at least Windows 10 Professional)
- Go to: Ubuntu for Windows and follow the instructions.
- Alternatively you can just run
choco install -y wsl-ubuntu-1804. It will install the wsd (windows subsystem for linux) automatically.
To enter this environment, please use the BASH command
bash.exe
If for some reason, all of the above fails, then you can try running a container in your machine:
docker run -v /c/Users/jofis:/root -v /c/Users/jofis/jvm:/usr/lib/jvm --rm --name container-developer -td ubuntu
you can now use your docker machine to build your project. The volume mappings ensure that your home folder is shared and so will be .m2 and .sdkman (should you use it), with it. They also ensure that the jvms are shared in order to be used with intellij.
To enter this environment, please go into your container:
docker exec -it container-developer bash
NOTE: 🔴 Remember to be careful not to remove this container accidentally
4. Installing Java in Ubuntu for Windows
Once you are in your environment, please choose one of the following sequence of commands:
4.1 SDK-MAN. Via SdkMan!
curl -s "https://get.sdkman.io" | bash
source "$HOME/.sdkman/bin/sdkman-init.sh"
sdk install java 8.0.242.hs-adpt
sdk install java 11.0.6.hs-adpt
sdk install java 12.0.2.hs-adpt
sdk install java 13.0.2.hs-adpt
sdk install java 14.0.0.hs-adpt
- If you'd like you can add this to you .bashrc. This contains aliases that you can use to quickly switch betweek Java SDKs.
alias java8="sdk use java 8.0.242.hs-adpt"
alias java11="sdk use java 11.0.6.hs-adpt"
alias java12="sdk use java 12.0.2.hs-adpt"
alias java13="sdk use java 13.0.2.hs-adpt"
alias java14="sdk use java 14.0.0.hs-adpt"
alias m2disable="rm ~/.m2/settings.xml"
alias m2enable="cp /your_repo_folder/settings.xml ~/.m2/"
4.2. Ubuntu. Via Ubuntu commandline with APT
apt-get -y update
apt-get -y upgrade
apt -y install apt-transport-https ca-certificates wget dirmngr gnupg software-properties-common
wget -qO - https://adoptopenjdk.jfrog.io/adoptopenjdk/api/gpg/key/public | apt-key add -
add-apt-repository --yes https://adoptopenjdk.jfrog.io/adoptopenjdk/deb/
apt -y update
apt -y install openjdk-11-jdk
apt install openjdk-13-jdk
apt -y install adoptopenjdk-8-hotspot
apt -y autoremove
- If you'd like you can add this to you .bashrc. This contains aliases that you can use to quickly switch betweek Java SDKs.
alias java8="export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/adoptopenjdk-8-hotspot-amd64 && update-java-alternatives -s adoptopenjdk-8-hotspot-amd64"
alias java11="export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.11.0-openjdk-amd64 && update-java-alternatives -s java-1.11.0-openjdk-amd64"
if [[ -d /usr/lib/jvm/java-13-oracle ]]
then
alias java13="export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-13-oracle && update-java-alternatives -s java-13-oracle"
elif [[ -d /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.13.0-openjdk-amd64 ]]
then
alias java13="export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.13.0-openjdk-amd64 && update-java-alternatives -s java-1.13.0-openjdk-amd64"
else
echo "Java13 not found!"
fi
alias m2disable="rm ~/.m2/settings.xml"
alias m2enable="cp /your_repo_folder/settings.xml ~/.m2/"
NOTE: the m2disable and the m2enable aliases are there so that you can easily switch between a possible settings.xml file and not having any installed.
4.3. Install utilities
apt install -y vim
apt install -y git
apt install -y git-gui
apt install -y maven
5. Intellij
Let's finally look at how can we use intellij with these command lines. If you picked up the container solution, please make sure that your container is running. We have already seen above how to log in it.
For this example we are going to look at the most complicated example. This is the one that does not use SDKMAN to get the different Java SDK's
Since we are sharing the jvm folder, we can just configure Intellij to use Java 11 for example:
Now let's search for Terminal in Preferences/Settings:
- This our initial setting in a Windows environment. The
cmdcommand line:
- We can choose
bash, if we have installed Ubuntu for Windows:
- We can choose
powershellif we don't have Ubuntu for Windows installed. This is the one we pick for our example:
- If we run the usual commands to get into the docker enviroment and as a recap on my example these are:
docker-machine.exe env default | Invoke-Expression
docker exec -it container-developer bash
We then get something like this:
This is it, these are just some examples on how we can get a machine to work for us.
6. Conclusion
I deliberately did not use GIT for windows, because in this setting we are using an ubuntu command line. This means that we have much more possibilities. Also, the MinGW provided by this installation, needs quite a lot of fine-tuning before it gets reasonably functional.
We are always way better off, if we can get the Windows Subsystem for Linux to work. Unfortunately that is not the case for Windows Home Edition 10 users, and that is why, if we want to use a real Unix/Linux based system, then we have to use containers. Virtual machines don't really appeal to me in this case because of the resource consumption they represent.
If you are using a Professional or Enterprise version, you are very likely to be able to use the WSL. This has a great advantage because no container will be needed and to configure Intellij you only need to provide bash as the Terminal command.
SDK-Man is always a favorite of mine, because of how easy it is to install Java versions. The only disadvantage we may point out is that they have a fixed number of different Java versions where we don't control the addition. Using apt we can add a lot more, but it does add quite a bit of complexity to the system.
We could have done all of this without choco and without PowerShell, but that would add other challenges and would probably make this installation much more complex.
I hope that you enjoyed this article as much as I enjoyed writing it.
If you enjoyed it, please share it in the links below.
Take care, stay interested, stay logic, stay safe!
If you happen to be interested into further deepen your knowledge about systems, you might want to have a look at a video I created about saving a system that appears to be broken for good over here:
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