Guide: Developing Vector on Windows on AWS

This is a brief guide to developing Vector on Windows via an EC2 Windows VM.

Create an EC2 instance with Windows server 2019. A t2.2xlarge with at least 120gb storage works well. You will need to use Remote Desktop to connect to the machine. Assign a keypair to the instance which you can use to decrypt the RDP Administrator password.

Install Visual C++ from here:

Microsoft C++ Build Tools - Visual Studio

Select Desktop Development with C++, also select CLang. This may get more than you need, but it works.

To install Rust, install rustup-init.exe from:

rustup.rs - The Rust toolchain installer

Install git from Git - Downloading Package

Install chocolatey by pasting this into a PowerShell terminal:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

Install cmake from Download

Install perl from Strawberry Perl for Windows

Git clone the Vector project (using git bash). In a PowerShell window, cd to the Vector folder and run:

.\scripts\environment\bootstrap-windows-2019.ps1

You will get some errors about FilePath being null. This doesn’t seem to stop things working.

You may get a gcm : The term 'clang' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. error.

Adding the below bundled llvm bin directory from BuildTools to PATH will fix this. Note: Notice the 2022 in the file path below.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\BuildTools\VC\Tools\Llvm\x64\bin

cargo build and cargo test should then work as normal.