Windows Packaging Instructions

The steps to get packaging up and running on Windows are difficult to keep consistent so I've documented them here. This may also be helpful for others installing from the latest source on the GitHub repository.

Note: I am currently using VMware Fusion so a few steps are specific to that (e.g. shared folders).

Initial setup

Download the Windows 10 ISO. Use separate VMs for 32 and 64-bit versions.
Download and run the Build Tools for Visual Studio installer. Check the "Visual C++ build tools" workload and click install. This can take some time.
Install rustup with the default options¹. Note: Due to the issue described here, it can significantly improve installation times to temporarily turn off Windows Defender security settings during the installation.
Install Python 3.7 and ensure "Add Python 3.7 to path" is checked.
Enable Shared Folders from VMware and share the autopy repo directory.

Confirm Python & Rust setup

Open Command Prompt and run py -3.7 to confirm Python is setup correctly.
Run rustc --help to confirm Rust is installed correctly.

Install adjacent Python versions

Install Python 3.6.
Install Python 3.5.
Install Python 2.7.

For these installations, "Add Python to path" does not need to be checked.

Build the Python wheel

Enter pushd into the command prompt, open VMware Shared Folders in the file browser, drag the autopy repo directory to the prompt, and hit enter.
Run call scripts/windows.cmd. This will build and validate a binary wheel for each of the above Python versions.
Alternatively, if just installing from source locally, run py -3.7 setup.py build install, where 3.7 is your local Python version.

[1]: Instructions from here. ↩

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