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Building on Windows

This repository can be built on native Windows with the MSVC Rust toolchain. The steps below are the reference setup for building both the Rust engine and the Tauri Studio application without WSL.

Supported setup

  • Windows 10 or Windows 11, x64
  • Rust stable with the x86_64-pc-windows-msvc target
  • Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools
  • Windows 11 SDK 10.0.22621.0 or newer
  • LLVM for libclang.dll
  • Node.js 20+ with npm.cmd

Required Windows components

Install Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools with these components:

  • Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.VCTools
  • Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Tools.x86.x64
  • Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.Windows11SDK.22621
  • Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.CoreBuildTools

Install LLVM so that libclang.dll is available, for example under C:\Program Files\LLVM\bin\libclang.dll.

Why the environment matters

The Rust build depends on two pieces of native Windows tooling:

  • MSVC and the Windows SDK, which provide cl.exe, link.exe, and system libraries such as kernel32.lib
  • LLVM, which provides libclang.dll for crates that use bindgen

If those tools are installed but not active in the current shell, Cargo may fail with errors such as:

  • link.exe not found
  • kernel32.lib not found
  • Unable to find libclang

Build the Rust engine

Open cmd.exe or PowerShell and run the build from a Visual Studio developer environment.

call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat"
set "LIBCLANG_PATH=C:\Program Files\LLVM\bin"
%USERPROFILE%\.cargo\bin\cargo.exe build --release --bin open-ontologies

Expected output:

  • target\release\open-ontologies.exe

Build the Studio frontend

Use the real Node.js installation, not the Windows app execution alias. On some systems node.exe may resolve to a packaged app path under WindowsApps, while npm is missing from PATH. If that happens, prepend C:\Program Files\nodejs to PATH before running npm.cmd.

set "PATH=C:\Program Files\nodejs;%PATH%"
cd studio
npm.cmd install
npm.cmd run build

The build step also runs npm run prepare-engine, which copies:

  • target\release\open-ontologies.exe

to:

  • studio\src-tauri\binaries\open-ontologies-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.exe

Build the full Tauri desktop app

From the same shell, with MSVC and LLVM already configured:

call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\BuildTools\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat"
set "LIBCLANG_PATH=C:\Program Files\LLVM\bin"
set "PATH=C:\Program Files\nodejs;%USERPROFILE%\.cargo\bin;%PATH%"
cd studio
npm.cmd run tauri build

Expected outputs:

  • studio\src-tauri\target\release\open-ontologies-studio.exe
  • studio\src-tauri\target\release\bundle\msi\open-ontologies-studio_0.1.0_x64_en-US.msi
  • studio\src-tauri\target\release\bundle\nsis\open-ontologies-studio_0.1.0_x64-setup.exe

Runtime notes

  • serve-unix is intentionally unavailable on Windows. Use serve or serve-http instead.
  • ~ path expansion uses %USERPROFILE% on Windows.
  • The Studio backend no longer depends on sh, lsof, or Homebrew-specific paths when running on Windows.

Troubleshooting

link.exe or kernel32.lib not found

The Visual Studio Build Tools installation is incomplete, or vcvars64.bat was not called in the current shell.

Unable to find libclang

LLVM is not installed, or LIBCLANG_PATH does not point to the directory containing libclang.dll.

npm is not recognized

Install Node.js from the standard Windows installer and ensure C:\Program Files\nodejs is on PATH. If a WindowsApps alias shadows Node, explicitly prepend the Node.js installation directory before running npm.cmd.

prepare-engine says the engine binary does not exist

Build the engine first with:

%USERPROFILE%\.cargo\bin\cargo.exe build --release --bin open-ontologies