Installation on Windows
Installation Options
Note
While administrator privileges/sudo may be necessary to install portmod’s dependencies, you should not run portmod with administrator privileges. It is designed to be run as a user program.
Chocolatey
Chocolatey can optionally be used to install the dependencies. This must be done in a prompt with administrator privileges.
choco install git python310 sandboxie
This should add most of the tools to your PATH automatically. It will
not add the sandboxie directory to your PATH, so that must be done manually.
Portmod can then be installed with pip. Note that this can be done as a regular user if you add the flag --user at the end.
pip3 install portmod --upgrade
WSL2
Portmod also works in WSL2 (WSL1 is incompatible). As there are many different linux distros available for WSL2, we cannot provide an example for every WSL2 image here.
Some WSL2 setup may be required. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install.
E.g. Using Ubuntu WSL:
sudo apt-get install git python3 bubblewrap
Portmod can then be installed with pip. Note that this can be done as a regular user if you add the flag --user at the end.
pip3 install portmod --upgrade
Installing Manually
In addition to the dependencies specified in Installing Portmod, noting that the python dependencies can be installed with pip, which comes with Python, you will likely need to install several other dependencies, or make some changes to get previously mentioned dependencies to work.
Python
https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/
If installing manually, python provides an option to add it to your
PATH environment variable during installation, which you should
select (otherwise, you must add the python scripts directory to your
PATH manually).
Git
https://git-scm.com/download/win
While a dependency for all systems, it generally is not already installed on Windows.
When installing manually, Git will add the necessary directory to your
PATH by default (the “recommended” option), and as long as you do
not choose the “Use Git from Git Bash Only” option when installing,
Portmod will be able to find your Git installation automatically.
7-zip
Note
7-zip is not generally needed any more since Pybuild1 is deprecated. Some of the repositories which haven’t been updated in a while may still rely on it.
7-zip is optional, and can be replaced with other archive tools which are supported by patool (unfortunately, no nicely formatted list exists, but see the repo for supported programs).
7-zip is recommended as it covers most archive types not supported natively by patool, including the commonly encountered types (see note on patool in dependencies section on the Installing Portmod page).
The 7-zip program files directory needs to be added to your PATH
environment variable so that it can be detected by patool.
Sandboxie
https://github.com/sandboxie-plus/Sandboxie/releases
Either the classic or the “plus” version can be used. Note that the “plus” version contains non-Free components.
Sandboxie is the Sandbox tool Portmod interfaces with on Windows (see Sandbox). Note that Portmod automatically configures Sandboxie; you do not need to, and indeed should not, modify the sandbox configurations generated by Portmod.
The sandboxie program files directory needs to be added to your PATH
environment variable so that it can be detected by portmod.
PySAT
(known on pypi as python-sat)
The PySAT wheels distributed on pypi require Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable, which if you don’t already have, can be found at the following location:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads
Setup information
It is worth noting that, while Portmod in general does not require
administrator privileges, you may need administrator privileges to
create symlinks on certain versions of Windows (newer versions of
Windows 10 should support creating symlinks without privileges, though
it may be necessary to enable a developer feature for this).
Currently the only symlink portmod requires is the profile symlink, so
when you select a profile using
portmod <prefix> select profile set, you might need to ensure that
portmod is run with administrator privileges.