Windows - Dapple Install/Dapple Init

[cswatson]

I'm following this tutorial: http://blog.nexusdev.us/dapple-tutorial/

First I had some trouble installing Dapple. I was able to figure it out - installing window-build-tools via npm and then installing the .Net sdk.

I still received an error stating: Failed at the secp256k1@3.2.2 rebuild script 'node-gyp rebuild'.
But the installation was completed otherwise.

Now when I run "dapple init" in my project directory, this follows:

-Secp256k1 bindings are not compiled. Pure JS implementation will be used.
-ERROR: ENOENT: no such file or directory, lstat 'C:\dapple-tutorial\Dappfile'

[dbrock]

Do you have the ability to run Docker containers?

If so, you might want to try using the dapple-docker script, which functions as a drop-in replacement for dapple. This script works by mounting your file system into a Docker container such that you are able to pretend that you have the Solidity compiler and Dapple installed natively.

So you would do e.g. mkdir foo; cd foo; dapple-docker init; dapple-docker test, etc. If this seems to work for you, then you might want to install dapple-docker under the name dapple for your convenience.

I don't think this has been tested on Windows before, though, so please let me know if you have any problems.

[cswatson]

Okay - so I had a little more time to dig in and do some problem solving.

I just did a fresh install of Dapple (via npm) and I actually had a clean install this time. No errors at all, it worked perfectly.

I still had the -ERROR: ENOENT: no such file or directory, lstat 'C:\dapple-tutorial\Dappfile' error occurring, but I dug into the source code this time.

The problem is in "./lib/workspace.js", specifically at line 77:

if (fs.existsSync(dappfilePath)) {
      throw new Error('dappfile already exists');
    }

From what I gather, fs.existsSync(dappfilePath) is looking for dappfilePath and crashes when it finds that it doesn't exist, instead of making the directory. I deleted this if statement and ran dapple init once more and .dapple, build, src and DappFile were all installed in my target directory.

I put the if statement back in the code, ran it again and received the "dapp file already exists code", as intended.

I'll try to debug this a little more and get it to work properly with the if statement. But that was the necessary work, as of now.

Cheers.

*I'm still trying to figure it out. But the problem is definitely that instead of returning "false" when fs.existsSync()can't find the file, it returns an error.

[OnlyOneJMJQ]

Commenting out the same lines @cswatson did also worked for me.

[ghost]

It's because of the way fs.existsSync() works. If the passed file doesn't exist, it simply throws an error. All you need to do is wrap the code in a try-catch block and you've a fix.

var dappfilePath = path.join(root_dir, constants.DAPPFILE_FILENAME);
try{
	if (fs.existsSync(dappfilePath)) {
	  throw new Error('dappfile already exists');
	}
}catch(err){
	console.log('Dappfile doesn\'t exist. Creating..');
}`