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This is an unofficial guide. Community testing, feedback, and improvements are welcome and greatly appreciated.

1. Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install.

   Note: Docker for Windows expects path to have the format /c/foo/bar, but WSL uses /mnt/c/foo/bar instead.

   Run winver and check which version of Windows you have. If you are using 1803 or higher, then you need to create a file /etc/wsl.conf with the following content to make sure your drives are mounted at the root rather than inside /mnt:

   [automount]
   root = /
   

   If you are using an older version than 1803, you need to create custom bind points:

   sudo mkdir /c
   sudo mount --bind /mnt/c /c
   

   For more on how to properly set up Docker for Windows and WSL see here.

2. Install and set up Docker:

   • Install Docker for Windows: https://docs.docker.com/desktop/install/windows-install/.
   • Link Windows Subsystem for Linux to Docker for Windows: https://medium.com/@sebagomez/installing-the-docker-client-on-ubuntus-windows-subsystem-for-linux-612b392a44c4.
     • You should end up with the Docker client running on Linux (WSL) sending commands to your Docker Engine daemon installed on Windows.
   • Go to Docker Desktop > Settings > Resources > File Sharing and make sure you check the drives where you are going to run mattermost-server from.

   Note: MM-7971 introduced using docker-compose to manage containers. To preserve your data on upgrade, execute the following steps.

   First, backup from any existing containers:

   mysqldump -h 127.0.0.1 --column-statistics=0 -u mmuser -p mattermost_test > mm_mysql_backup.sql
   pg_dump -U mmuser -W -d mattermost_test -h 127.0.0.1 > mm_postgres_backup.bak
   

   Then after upgrading and starting the new docker-compose managed containers, restore the data:

   mysql -u mmuser -p -h 127.0.0.1 mattermost_test < mm_mysql_backup.sql
   psql -U mmuser -W -h 127.0.0.1 -f mm_postgres_backup.bak mattermost_test
   

   If you don’t migrate your data, the new, docker-compose-managed containers will start out empty. To remove the old containers and destroy any existing data use make clean-old-docker.

3. Install docker-compose (using bash)

   sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/latest/download/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
   sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
   

4. Install Go using bash (modify installation to latest Go version from here):

   sudo apt-get install -y build-essential
   sudo rm -rf /usr/local/go
   wget https://dl.google.com/go/go$VERSION.$OS-$ARCH.tar.gz
   sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go$VERSION.$OS-$ARCH.tar.gz
   

5. Set up your Go workspace:

   1. In PowerShell mkdir d:\Projects\go
   2. In bash ln -s "/mnt/d/Projects/go" /home/<Linux User>/go

6. Update your shell’s initialization script (e.g. .bashrc or .zshrc) and add the following:

   export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
   ulimit -n 8096
   

7. Reload your bash configuration to effect the changes above:

   source ~/.bashrc
   

8. Fork Mattermost server on GitHub from https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server.

9. Clone the Mattermost source code from your fork:

   git clone https://github.com/YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/mattermost-server.git
   

10. Start the server and test your environment:

    cd mattermost-server
    make run-server
    curl http://localhost:8065/api/v4/system/ping
    make stop-server
    

    If successful, the curl step will return a JSON object containing "status":"OK".

    Note: Browsing directly to http://localhost:8065/ will display 404 Not Found until the web app is configured. See Web App Developer Setup and Mobile App Developer Setup for additional setup.

    The stop-server make target does not stop all the Docker containers started by run-server. To stop the running Docker containers:

    make stop-docker
    

Troubleshooting: 

1. If you see an error like the input device is not a TTY. If you are using mintty, try prefixing the command with 'winpty', then reinstall Git for Windows and make sure you choose Use Windows’ default console window instead of Use MinTTY.

2. The LDAP Docker container is sometimes slow to start. If you see the following message, either increase the wait time in the make file or run make run twice in a row.

   Ldap test user test.one
   starting mattermost-openldap
   ldap_sasl_bind(SIMPLE): Can't contact LDAP server (-1)
   ldap_sasl_bind(SIMPLE): Can't contact LDAP server (-1)
   ldap_sasl_bind(SIMPLE): Can't contact LDAP server (-1)
   ldap_sasl_bind(SIMPLE): Can't contact LDAP server (-1)
   ldap_sasl_bind(SIMPLE): Can't contact LDAP server (-1)
   ldap_sasl_bind(SIMPLE): Can't contact LDAP server (-1)
   Makefile:102: recipe for target 'start-docker' failed
   

3. If you see an error like nc: bad address 'postgres' when running make run-serverand PostgreSQL’s container just keeps restarting, check its logs in Docker Desktop. You should see something like:

   LOG: input in flex scanner failed at file "/etc/postgresql/postgresql.conf" line 1
   FATAL: configuration file "/etc/postgresql/postgresql.conf" contains errors
   

   If that’s the case, postgresql.conf is probably a directory rather than a file, which means the volume wasn’t mounted properly, so you are most likely missing some of the configuration changes from step 1 (Linux Subsystem Installation).

4. If you see an error like ERROR: for mattermost-postgres. Cannot create container for service postgres: status code not OK but 500: {"Message":"Unhandled exception: Drive has not been shared"}, make sure you enabled file sharing for the drive that contains the mattermost-server project.