• Without Cygwin
• With Cygwin
• The Manual Process -- try this if you want a newer version of darcs than the pre-packaged version supplied above

Without Cygwin

• Download and unzip the pre-packaged darcs and putty package for Windows. Let us refer to the resulting directory (including the path to it) as DARCSDIR.

• Add DARCSDIR to the end of your path:

• XP:

  • Right click on 'My Computer'.
  • Choose 'Properties'.
  • Click the 'Advanced' tab.
  • Click 'Environment variables'
• Vista: start -> control panel -> system -> change settings -> advanced -> environment variables
• Find the 'PATH' environment variable and choose to edit it.
• Add ';DARCSDIR ' to the end of the 'PATH' environment variable.

• Save and close the windows.

• If you want to use darcs over ssh you need to set up passwordless ssh login (password-based authentification is currently broken on windows). Darcs over ssh is required to push patches to a remote machine.
• Generate a pair of keys as described on section 8.2.1 of the putty documentation.

• To make ssh use your private key automatically (this is necessary since we are setting up passwordless ssh login) you need to start 'pageant'. Therefore:

  • Create a new shortcut 'pageant.exe' in the 'Start -> All programs -> Startup' menu. (These programs are automatically executed on login.)
  • The shortcut shall execute ' DARCSDIR/pageant.exe PATH-TO-THE-PRIVATE-KEY'. Note that since PATH-TO-THE-PRIVATE-KEY may contains spaces, it may be necessary to put quotes around it. It never hurts to put quotes around it.
  • Log out and log in again to check that 'pageant' automatically starts up.
  • Check that the key is loaded: double click the icon in the system tray. If there is listed one key, it should be fine. If no keys are listed, check the shortcut.
• If everything went well, the final check is executing "ssh USERNAME@HOST". If you get logged into the host you are done. If you are asked to enter your password then it is not working. Double-check that 'pageant' is started and the key is loaded, then go back through this process to figure out what went wrong. NOTE: this check is a very useful step in debugging. If anything ever seems wrong with your darcs-over-ssh behavior, then come back to this step!

• Now you can access your repository using, for example: darcs get USER@HOST:/PATH/TO/REPOSITORY

• If you want to configure user default prefs, you will need to define a HOME environment variable. If you do, darcs will look for the file '%HOME%\.darcs\defaults'.

With Cygwin

• Download and untar the pre-packaged darcs and putty package for cygwin.
• Add the resulting "darcsdir" directory to the end of your path.
• If you want to use darcs over ssh you need to set up passwordless ssh login. Darcs over ssh is required to push patches to a remote machine. Note that you have to set up a new ssh configuation using the putty executables in the darcsdir directory -- darcs will not use cygwin ssh nor your current cygwin ssh configuration.
• Generate a pair of keys as described on section 8.2.1 of the putty documentation.
• To make ssh use your private key automatically (this is necessary since we are setting up passwordless ssh login) you need to start 'pageant'. Therefore:
• Create a new shortcut 'pageant.exe' in the 'Start -> All programs -> Startup' menu. (These programs are automatically executed on login.)
• The shortcut shall execute ' DARCSDIR/pageant.exe PATH-TO-THE-PRIVATE-KEY'. Note that since PATH-TO-THE-PRIVATE-KEY may contains spaces, it may be necessary to put quotes around it. It never hurts to put quotes around it.
• Log out and log in again to check that 'pageant' automatically starts up.
• Check that the key is loaded: double click the icon in the system tray. If there is listed one key, it should be fine. If no keys are listed, check the shortcut.
• If you login to your cygwin shell through ssh for example you need to start pageant from this shell.
• For example you could add ' cygstart DARCSDIR/pageant.exe PATH-TO-THE-PRIVATE-KEY' to your .bash_profile script
• If everything went well, the final check is executing "ssh USERNAME@HOST" (note: this is the putty ssh executable that came in the darcsdir-cygwin.tar.bz2 package, not your normal cygwin ssh, which is usually found in /usr/bin/ssh.exe). If you get logged into the host you are done. If you are asked to enter your password then it is not working. Double-check that 'pageant' is started and the key is loaded, then go back through this process to figure out what went wrong. NOTE: this check is a very useful step in debugging. If anything ever seems wrong with your darcs-over-ssh behavior, then come back to this step!
• Now you can access your repository using, for example: darcs get USER@HOST:/PATH/TO/REPOSITORY

The Manual Process -- try this if you want a newer version of darcs than the pre-packaged version supplied above

The basics (with or without Cygwin):

• Download the latest darcs win32 binary from somewhere.

Pushing patches to a remote server requires a SSH implementation such as putty http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ which supports both SCP and SFTP. Interactive password prompting will not work because the SSH clients are executed by darcs, so passwordless public key authentication must be configured. For a putty-oriented tutorial see http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.60/htmldoc/Chapter8.html#pubkey.

To enable access of remote repositories over ssh (with or without Cygwin, if you want to use ssh):

• Download pagent.exe, puttygen.exe, plink.exe, sftp.exe, and pscp.exe from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
• Put darcs.exe, plink.exe, pscp.exe, sftp.exe, pagent.exe, and puttygen.exe in an empty directory.
• Rename plink.exe to ssh.exe and pscp.exe to scp.exe. (You could avoid renaming the files if you used the environment variables DARCS_SSH, etc; but renaming seems more convenient). Ensure that all these .exe files have permissions that allow you to execute them. If you are using cygwin, you can use "chmod ugo+x FILENAME" to enable execute permissions for each file.
• Set up passwordless ssh login as described on this page: http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.60/htmldoc/Chapter8.html#pubkey

Finally (without Cygwin):

• Add the directory where you stored the executables at the beginning of your path.

Finally (with Cygwin):

• Download cygwin-wrapper.bash, a cygwin bash script; put it in /usr/local/darcsdir-cygwin (directory as seen by cygwin), put all of the ssh .exe's mentioned above into the same directory. Rename the darcs.exe to "realdarcs.exe". Rename cygwin-wrapper.bash to "darcs". Add /usr/local/darcsdir-cygwin to the end of your path. Don't put /usr/local/darcsdir-cygwin at the beginning, because that directory contains executables such as "ssh.exe" which you probably don't want to execute when you execute "ssh" on the bash command-line. Make sure you don't have any other "darcs" executables earlier in your path. (Hint: enter the commands "type darcs" and "type ssh" at the bash command-line.)