The official documentation from Adobe doesn’t clearly state that Magento 2 can be installed on a Windows environment; however many tutorials found on the Internet still demo Magento 2 on a Windows environment.
Developers with no experience on Linux might have difficulties when trying to evaluate Magento 2 for the first time, so it is understandable to try an installation on a Windows environment to start taking their first steps into Magento 2.
This document assumes that Magento 2.3.x or 2.4.x is already installed in a full Windows environment (no VM or docker involved), so the installation process will be skipped in this article.
Since Windows is not the recommended environment for installing Magento, problems after a fresh install might be common. The first issue you would face after installing Magento 2.3.x or 2.4.x is the admin site display.
Ooops…. Now what?
When exploring the page via Developer Tools it is clear that something went wrong when loading the page scripts and theme.
The solution for this is tricky and the errors don’t tell that much for troubleshooting; however, remember that the recommended environment for installing Magento 2 is Linux; and that might be a good indication on how to deal with the problem.
One of the files in charge of loading the theme is Validator.php, located at vendor\magento\framework\View\Element\Template\File; inside there is the following function that validates if the current Magento path is related to the directory.
protected function isPathInDirectories($path, $directories)
{
if (!is_array($directories)) {
$directories = (array)$directories;
}
$realPath = $this->fileDriver->getRealPath($path);
foreach ($directories as $directory) {
if (0 === strpos($realPath, $directory)) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
Inside the foreach loop let’s compare the params $realPath and $directory passed to the strpos function:
echo $realPath;
installation\path\vendor\magento\module-backend\view\adminhtml\templates\page\js\require_js.phtml
echo $directory;
installation/path//var/view_preprocessed/pub/stat/
Did you notice? The slashes are in different directions, causing the isPathInDirectories to return false all the time.
The reason for this is that getRealPath will return the correct slash format for the current OS, being the backslashes the format for Windows file paths, while $directory is just considering the Linux convention; so the solution would be to use the same getRealPath function for converting the $directory variable into the correct Windows file format.
protected function isPathInDirectories($path, $directories)
{
if (!is_array($directories)) {
$directories = (array)$directories;
}
$realPath = $this->fileDriver->getRealPath($path);
foreach ($directories as $directory) {
$directory = $this->fileDriver->getRealPath($directory);
if (0 === strpos($realPath, $directory)) {
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
After this quick fix you can just refresh the browser for normally displaying the admin login page.
However, please be noted that the solution proposed here is just testing purposes. If you want to make the changes permanently you must follow the Magento developer standards for developing a plugin or preference.
