Building OFT on Windows

This document outlines the processes of building the OpenFUSIONToolkit (OFT) and its required libraries on Windows. This process should work for on Windows 10 and 11, but please note any caveats below and if you run into issues or find improvements please report and/or contribute them.

Note: In the steps below the placeholder paths like /path/to/oft or C:\path\to\oft are used. Be sure to replace this with the actual path to the OFT git repository on your system when running commands.

Using OFT with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (recommended)

At present building OFT on Windows is only supported through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). WSL provides a lightweight virtual machine that allows users to work in a Linux environment within the Windows OS. Modern virtual machines, such as those used by WSL, are high performance and you should observe minimal (if any) overhead from using WSL compared to a native Linux install on the same hardware.

Setting up the WSL environment

Here we will provide a brief summary of the steps to setup a suitable WSL environment for OFT. More detailed installation and other information can be found here.

To install WSL on Windows 10 or 11 all you need to do is open the "Command Prompt" application and issue the following command.

wsl --install

This will install WSL and a default Ubuntu environment, which should be suitable for building and running OFT. Once the initial steps in the command prompt have been completed you will need to restart your computer to complete the installation.

Recommended applications

In addition to WSL we also recommend installing the Windows Terminal app, which provides a more user friendly way to interact with WSL (and other text-based terminals) in Windows.

Building OFT using WSL

Once the WSL installation process is complete and Ubuntu is available you can follow the steps in [Building OFT on Linux] to install the required packages and build OFT itself.

Recommended additional packages

In addition to the packages mentioned in the Linux build we also recommend installing the wslu package, which provides additional utilities for enabling Ubuntu to interact with the Windows host OS. For example, wslu enables an installation of Jupyter on Ubuntu to transparently open in the default Windows browser.