How to install Truffle & TestRPC on Ubuntu or Windows 10 with “Windows subsystem for Linux”

David Burela blockchain, ,

I previously wrote how you can install Truffle & TestRPC on a windows machine, by using the Windows installers for Node & npm.
However I have found it is a much nicer experience to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux which provides a native Ubuntu shell with bash, which allows me to run all the Linux tools natively without issues. These install steps will work on an Ubuntu machine as well.

Prerequisite if running on Windows

  1. Enable Windows subsystem for Linux and install from Windows Store.Follow this short guide on how to enable it https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/install_guide 
  2. After following the steps in the guide above. Simply start the Ubuntu bash shellubuntu start

Install steps

[BEST] Option 1: Clean install on a machine without node

# Make sure Ubuntu is up to date
sudo apt-get update -y && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
# Install build essentials & python. lots of NPM libraries require these
sudo apt install build-essential python -y

# install nvm  https://github.com/creationix/nvm#install-script (the below command is a single line)
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.34.0/install.sh | bash

# restart bash to enable nvm (saves you restarting your terminal)
exec bash

# install node and our npm packages
nvm install node
npm install -g truffle ganache-cli

Option 2: Node is already installed by other means, this will force update node to the latest version

# Install the dist-upgrade package and run it to update to the latest node version
sudo npm -g install dist-upgrade
sudo dist-upgrade

npm install -g truffle ganache-cli

now you should be able to create a folder, go into it and run `truffle init` to create a new project template.

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How to access your C: drive

WSL automatically mounts your drives under \mnt\.  For example you can access c: by typing cd \mnt\c

I recommend putting your source code in c:/source/myproject, editing the code in VS Code, and then using the tools inside WSL by navigating to it e.g. cd /mnt/c/source/myproject then you can run commands like truffle unbox, truffle compile

Additional things to do

Now that your machine has it installed, I recommend you follow my other guide to get Visual Studio code configured for Truffle development.

10 thoughts on “How to install Truffle & TestRPC on Ubuntu or Windows 10 with “Windows subsystem for Linux””

  4. […] UPDATE 2017/08/25: Now that Truffle has made installation easier, I have cleaned up and streamlined the windows install steps below.However I recommend that instead look at using the new feature in Windows 10 that lets you run Linux tools directly in Windows. This is how I’ve been doing my development for the last few months https://davidburela.wordpress.com/2017/05/12/how-to-install-truffle-testrpc-on-ubuntu-or-windows-10-… […]

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  5. Hello David, finally I´ve installed truffle on my W10 machine and I am using an Ubuntu subsystem to run all the Linux tools natively without issues. I have a question (also, I´ve already installed the extension Solidity for Visual Studio Code)…When I create a new folder in truffle (f.e. named “Token”) where is it kept away? Because when I type “code .” in the Ubuntu tool inside the folder, Visual Code is initialized but doesn´t show me the dir of that folder and I can´t code nothing.

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  6. Hey David,

    This is a great guide thanks a million for writing this up.

    I was hoping you could maybe assist a bit further please. I followed the above instructions (obviously with the current version of truffle, which has changed a bit), now I get everything installed without serious complaint from the machine, but when I run “$truffle develop” it simply does absolutely nothing. “$truffle compile” however works fine.

    Any idea what might be causing this? Truffle doesn’t output any errors.

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