element-desktop/docs/windows-requirements.md

Windows

Requirements to build native modules

If you want to build native modules, make sure that the following tools are installed on your system.

• Node 14
• Python 3
• Strawberry Perl
• Rust
• Build Tools for Visual Studio 2019 with the following configuration:
  • On the Workloads tab:
    • Desktop & Mobile -> C++ build tools
  • On the Individual components tab:
    • MSVC VS 2019 C++ build tools
    • Windows 10 SDK (latest version available)
    • C++ CMake tools for Windows

Once installed make sure all those utilities are accessible in your PATH. In order to load all the C++ utilities installed by Visual Studio you can run the following in a terminal window.

call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" amd64

You can replace amd64 with x86 depending on your CPU architecture.