pkg_install should work in Windows

The current iteration of pkg_install was only tested on Linux and macOS. I currently do not have a Windows development environment available, so things were likely to be missed.

In particular, this failure comes to mind: https://buildkite.com/bazel/rules-pkg/builds/968. This might be caused by RUNFILES_DIR not being in the command's environment.

This is within tests only, though, so bazel running it may "just work".

Confirm and investigate.

Unfortunately windows package install does not work on Windows as far as I could test, with an error like:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\redsun82\AppData\Local\Temp\Bazel.runfiles_wd_pz4_y\runfiles\_main\go\_extractor-pack-installer_install_script.py", line 203, in <module>
    exit(main(sys.argv))
         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "C:\Users\redsun82\AppData\Local\Temp\Bazel.runfiles_wd_pz4_y\runfiles\_main\go\_extractor-pack-installer_install_script.py", line 195, in main
    installer.include_manifest_path(f)
  File "C:\Users\redsun82\AppData\Local\Temp\Bazel.runfiles_wd_pz4_y\runfiles\_main\go\_extractor-pack-installer_install_script.py", line 123, in include_manifest_path
    with open(path, 'r') as fh:
         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'go/_extractor-pack-installer_install_script-install-manifest.json'

I might be able to do some debugging and maybe come up with a patch for this in the coming days.

Perhaps, we can use commands related to Wix3 and NSIS to allow users to create Wix or NSI script files, and Bazel can use these script files for packaging. As for zip, we might use PowerShell's Compress-Archive?

I think there is already an issue to make a pkg_msi or equivalent. But there is little chance any of the maintainers are going to work on that.
That aside, it is a different feature set than what pkg_install does.

On Windows, "runfiles" aren't enabled by default, which can be changed by executing bazel run --enable_runfiles.

When runfiles are enabled (Unix default): the RUNFILES_DIR env var is set,
When runfiles are not enabled (Windows default): the RUNFILES_MANIFEST_FILE env var is set instead.

Unfortunately windows package install does not work on Windows [...]

This is hopefully addressed by:

Make pkg_install work without "runfiles" (Windows default) #984.

Make `pkg_install` work without runfiles (Windows default)

Make `pkg_install` work without "runfiles" (Windows default) (#984)

Make `pkg_install` work without runfiles (Windows default)

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pkg_install should work in Windows #387

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pkg_install should work in Windows #387

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redsun82 commented on Apr 29, 2024

hsjdhudn commented on Oct 12, 2025

tonyaiuto commented on Oct 14, 2025

rdesgroppes commented on Nov 5, 2025

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