Windows 10 PKC Installation

For Windows 10, you need to use Command Prompt.

Download PKC to your local machine

Once you had Git and Docker installed on your Windows 10 machine, you may launch Command Prompt and see the following prompt:

C:\Users\userName\Workspace>

Download the entire package using the git command. You may copy the instruction (after the > sign) as follows:

C:\Users\userName\Workspace>git clone https://github.com/xlp0/PKC.git

Windows Anamolies

Since PKC is designed around Linux-based containerization technology, which means that it will have many incompatibilities with Windows inherently. There are some tips that we captured here:

Consult the System Administrator of the Computer

Some system administrators will block users from installing WSL2.0. If this is the case, the Windows operating system needs to be reinstalled to avoid that blocking. See Windows WSL Troubleshooting and this webpage.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Update

After installing Docker Desktop, Windows 10 will often ask for the installation of WSL update. Please follow the wizard, and install the update accordingly.

VPN Software Interfering with WSL

Under Windows 10 Environment, some VPN software might interfere with Docker's Windows Subsystem for Linux, a.k.a. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), you will need to remove the interfering VPN software before installing Docker. Please note that not all VPN software interferes with WSL. In case you don't want to remove your VPN software, or your Docker and Bash have compatibility issues, please try the following solution:Installing VirtualBox for PKC.

Choosing adequate directories

Mitch Altman identified the following scenarios for PKC installation on Windows 10, which indicate that Windows users will face many unexpected problems during installation, the following lists are some important ones. Make sure that you don't pick a directory outside of your usual Users/Documents directory. If you choose some directories outside of your User/Documents directory, it is possible that certain batch script commands will stop to work, due to file right access authority issues.

GNU TAR might not work

Mitch also found that tar command may not work on certain machines. To ensure that PKC will install smoothly on Windows 10 machines, we put an .exe (Windows executable) file unzip.exe in the PKC/resources directory. We also made sure that a initial data package, namely mountPoint.zip is included in the resources directory, so that the up.bat script will be able to conduct the automatic installation and initial launch process completely.

Kick off the microservice launch process

1. After the git clone instruction copied relevant data to your working directory, using the command cd to the PKC directory that contains the two script files:up.sh and up.bat. For Windows users, you need to type: up.bat to execute the batch script. Note that Windows 10 requires the script command to be up.bat, not ./up.sh.

C:\Users\userName\Workspace>cd PKC
C:\Users\userName\Workspace\PKC>.\up.bat

1. After you submitted the .\up.bat in your command prompt, you will need to launch one more command to make Semantic MediaWiki work properly.
2. Depends on your network connection, this process will download around 3GB of data, so that it will take a while.

Copy and paste the following command to your command prompt.

docker exec pkc_mediawiki_1 php /var/www/html/maintenance/update.php

1. It will first wait for 5 seconds before updating content in the database, so that the whole process will take up to a minute to finish.
2. Open a browser: type the following URL to the browser's URL field: http://localhost:9352.