Several users have reported success in running a buildslave under Windows. The following list of steps might help you accomplish the same. They are a list of what I did as a unix guy struggling to make a winXP box run the buildbot unit tests. When I was done, most of the unit tests passed. If you discover things that are missing or incorrect, please send your corrections to the buildbot-devel mailing list (archives and subscription information are available at http://buildbot.sourceforge.net). Many thanks to Mike "Bear" Taylor for developing this list. 0. Check to make sure your PATHEXT environment variable has ";.PY" in it -- if not set your global environment to include it. Control Panels / System / Advanced / Environment Variables / System variables 1. Install python -- 2.4 -- http://python.org * run win32 installer - no special options needed so far 2. install zope interface package -- 3.0.1final -- http://www.zope.org/Products/ZopeInterface * run win32 installer - it should auto-detect your python 2.4 installation 3. python for windows extensions -- build 203 -- http://pywin32.sourceforge.net/ * run win32 installer - it should auto-detect your python 2.4 installation the installer complains about a missing DLL. Download mfc71.dll from the site mentioned in the warning (http://starship.python.net/crew/mhammond/win32/) and move it into c:\Python24\DLLs 4. at this point, to preserve my own sanity, I grabbed cygwin.com's setup.exe and started it. It behaves a lot like dselect. I installed bash and other tools (but *not* python). I added C:\cygwin\bin to PATH, allowing me to use tar, md5sum, cvs, all the usual stuff. I also installed emacs, going from the notes at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html . Their FAQ at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/faq3.html#install has a note on how to swap CapsLock and Control. I also modified PATH (in the same place as PATHEXT) to include C:\Python24 and C:\Python24\Scripts . This will allow 'python' and (eventually) 'trial' to work in a regular command shell. 5. twisted -- 2.0 -- http://twistedmatrix.com/projects/core/ * unpack tarball and run python setup.py install Note: if you want to test your setup - run: python c:\python24\Scripts\trial.py -o -R twisted (the -o will format the output for console and the "-R twisted" will recursively run all unit tests) I had to edit Twisted (core)'s setup.py, to make detectExtensions() return an empty list before running builder._compile_helper(). Apparently the test it uses to detect if the (optional) C modules can be compiled causes the install process to simply quit without actually installing anything. I installed several packages: core, Lore, Mail, Web, and Words. They all got copied to C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages\ At this point trial --version works, so 'trial -o -R twisted' will run the Twisted test suite. Note that this is not necessarily setting PYTHONPATH, so it may be running the test suite that was installed, not the one in the current directory. 6. I used CVS to grab a copy of the latest Buildbot sources. To run the tests, you must first add the buildbot directory to PYTHONPATH. Windows does not appear to have a Bourne-shell-style syntax to set a variable just for a single command, so you have to set it once and remember it will affect all commands for the lifetime of that shell session. set PYTHONPATH=. trial -o -r win32 buildbot.test To run against both buildbot-CVS and, say, Twisted-SVN, do: set PYTHONPATH=.;C:\path to\Twisted-SVN All commands are done using the normal cmd.exe command shell. As of buildbot-0.6.4, only one unit test fails (test_webPathname_port) when you run under the 'win32' reactor. (if you run under the default reactor, many of the child-process-spawning commands fail, but test_webPathname_port passes. go figure.) Actually setting up a buildslave is not yet covered by this document. Patches gladly accepted. -Brian