windows 8

Windows 10 is the only release Acquia's BLT officially supports. But there are still many people who use Windows 7 and 8, and most of these people don't have control over what version of Windows they use.

Drupal VM has supported Windows 7, 8, and 10 since I started building it a few years ago (at that time I was still running Windows 7), and using a little finesse, you can actually get an entire modern BLT-based Drupal 8 project running on Windows 7 or 8, as long as you do all the right things, as will be demonstrated in this blog post.

2016-10-04 Update: Microsoft finally allows long paths, provided you are running the latest version of Windows 10; you have to opt-in by editing a group policy for now—maybe by 2050 or so this will be the default, once all the old legacy Windows apps are finally dead!

For some reason, Windows doesn't play well with deep folder hierarchies. Often, when building Drupal projects inside VMs with synced directories, I end up with folders with 10+ levels of hierarchy, and when I try to delete the directory within windows, I get the error "Source path too long" (or "File path too long"). This happens a lot with npm, composer, or other package/dependency managers, and I'm amazed there's no easy workaround... but I figured I'd document what I do here, because I've had to look up the process too many times.

1 - Download robocopy

First, download and install the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools, which includes a CLI utility, robocopy.

[Update: I've been playing around with Windows 8 Pro for a few hours since receiving it from Amazon (Win 8 Pro is only $66 on Amazon!), and I have a few more observations: