How to troubleshoot symbolic link issues on Windows

If you're using Cal.com self hosting instance on windows, you might be struggling with Prisma Environment variables not working. One of the reasons why this happens is because by default, symbolic links are disabled on windows OS.

To test the state of symbolic links configuration in your local repo, please run the following command from your root

git config --get core.symlinks

This should return false. If that is the case, you can follow one of the two following methods to enable symbolic links

Enable symbolic links

Create a new clone with symbolic links enabled (Recommended)

Please use the following steps to clone the repo with symbolic links:

1. Open your gitbash with elevated privileges (Admin) and run the following command:

   git clone -c core.symlinks=true https://github.com/calcom/cal.com.git

2. Complete the installation by following the post clone steps mentioned in Development Setup & Production Build.

Enable symbolic links in your existing cloned repo

This is quite tricky, and not the recommended way of troubleshooting this issue. Please use the following steps to troubleshoot:

1. Open your gitbash with elevated privileges (Admin), go to your Cal.com project root and run the following command:

   git config core.symlinks true

2. Now run the following command and confirm that it returns true

   git config --get core.symlinks

3. Next, simply remove the .env file located in packages/prisma/

4. Finally, run the following command to restore the .env file but as a symbolic link

   git restore packages/prisma/.env

That's it. Your symbolic link should now be working as expected.