gatsby-on-windows.md

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Gatsby on windows

Setting up your environment for building native Node.js modules.

Many Gatsby plugins and themes require building native Node.js modules e.g. Sharp (a common Gatsby dependency used for image processing). To do so, you need a functional build environment (Python and Visual C++ Build Tools).

The easy way to setup your build environment on Windows is to install the windows-build-tools package by runnning npm install --global windows-build-tools on an admin powershell console. On installing this package, it downloads and installs the Visual C++ Build Tools 2015, provided free of charge by Microsoft. These tools are required to compile popular native modules. It will also install Python 2.7, configuring your machine and npm appropriately.