Installing Revue on Windows

Revue runs on Windows through WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux). There is no native Windows build — inside WSL2 your machine reports linux x86_64, and Revue's Linux x86_64 build installs and runs there natively.

This page documents the whole journey, including the steps that surprise people. Several of them look like failures but are expected. Each is called out below.

What this means in practice: you run Claude Code itself inside WSL2, from the WSL2 shell, with your project accessible there. Revue installs into the Linux environment inside WSL2, and the /revue skill is only visible to a Claude Code session running in that same environment. If you run Claude Code on native Windows, it will not see Revue. Steps 4 and 6 cover this.

Before you start

You need:

• Windows 10 version 2004+ or Windows 11, on a 64-bit Intel/AMD machine
• Administrator rights, if WSL2 is not already installed
• A willingness to reboot once — Windows requires it after installing WSL2

Windows on ARM is not supported. WSL2 on an ARM64 machine reports linux aarch64, which we do not publish a build for. See If you are on Windows ARM below.

Step 1 — Run the installer from PowerShell

Open PowerShell as Administrator (right-click → Run as administrator) and run:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Revue-sh/revue/main/scripts/install.ps1 -OutFile "$env:TEMP\revue-install.ps1"
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "$env:TEMP\revue-install.ps1" -Key lic_your_key_here

Why two lines instead of a neat one-liner? The compact & ([scriptblock]::Create(...)) form fails to parse on Windows PowerShell 5.1 — it reports an unexpected ) token. Download first, then run. If your terminal warns that you are pasting multiple lines, that is expected; run them one at a time.

Replace lic_your_key_here with your licence key, or omit -Key entirely to install without one.

Step 2 — Let it install WSL2 (if you don't have it)

If WSL2 is missing, the installer offers to run wsl --install for you.

This requires an elevated PowerShell. Without Administrator rights the installer tells you so and stops — that is deliberate, not a bug. Re-open PowerShell as Administrator and run it again.

⚠️ The installer will exit with a non-zero code here. That is expected.

wsl --install forces a reboot, and the Revue installation cannot survive it. So the installer:

1. installs WSL2,
2. tells you to reboot,
3. exits with a non-zero status.

A non-zero exit normally means failure. Here it does not. It is how the installer signals "I did my part, now reboot and run me again." Reboot, then return to Step 1.

Step 3 — Launch your distro once, before anything else

After the reboot, open your Linux distribution from the Start menu (usually Ubuntu) and let it finish first-run setup. It will ask you to create a UNIX username and password.

Do not skip this. A freshly installed distro is uninitialised, and running the installer against it can fail or drop you into WSL's first-run setup mid-install — which looks like a Revue bug but is not.

You will know it worked when wsl -l -v shows your distro as Running or Stopped with VERSION 2:

wsl -l -v
#   NAME      STATE      VERSION
# * Ubuntu    Stopped    2

If VERSION shows 1, upgrade it:

wsl --set-version Ubuntu 2

Step 4 — Install Claude Code inside WSL2

Revue's installer requires the claude CLI, and it must be installed inside WSL2 — not on Windows. A Windows-side Claude Code installation does not satisfy it, because the installer runs inside the Linux environment and cannot see it.

Open your WSL2 shell and install Claude Code there, then continue.

Step 5 — Run the installer again

With WSL2 running and Claude Code installed inside it, run the PowerShell command from Step 1 again. This time it will bootstrap through to WSL2 and install Revue.

You can also run it directly inside your WSL2 shell:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Revue-sh/revue/main/scripts/install.sh -o /tmp/revue-install.sh
bash /tmp/revue-install.sh --key lic_your_key_here

Expect a uv bootstrap step

A fresh WSL2 distro has neither uv nor pipx. Rather than stopping, the installer downloads and installs uv for you, and prints the SHA-256 of the installer it downloaded so you can verify it. That extra output is expected.

To skip the bootstrap, pass --no-bootstrap and install uv or pipx yourself first.

Step 6 — Run Claude Code from your WSL2 shell

Revue now lives inside WSL2, so this is where you use it. Open your WSL2 shell, change into your project, and start Claude Code there:

cd ~/code/your-project     # a repo cloned inside WSL2, or /mnt/c/Users/you/your-project
claude

The /revue skill is available to that session because both Claude Code and Revue are in the same Linux environment. A Claude Code session started on native Windows runs in a different environment and will not see Revue.

Two notes on your files:

• A repo cloned inside WSL2 (for example under ~/code) is fastest.
• A repo on your Windows drive is reachable at /mnt/c/..., but file access across the boundary is slower and some Git operations behave differently.

If you are on Windows ARM

Revue does not support Windows on ARM. WSL2 on those machines reports linux aarch64, and we publish no aarch64 build — the installer detects this and refuses rather than installing something that cannot run.

Your alternative is to run Revue in your CI pipeline instead, via the revue-ci integration for GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket. See CI Setup. That path does not depend on your local machine's architecture at all.

Things that will not work

Troubleshooting

"No WSL version 2 distribution was found" WSL is installed but has no distro yet, or your distro is still version 1:

wsl --install -d Ubuntu      # install one
wsl --set-version Ubuntu 2   # or upgrade an existing v1 distro

If you just installed a distro, launch it once from the Start menu first (Step 3).

The installer exited non-zero after installing WSL2 Expected. Reboot and run it again — see Step 2.

bash is not recognised You are in PowerShell or CMD, not a Linux shell. Use the PowerShell command in Step 1, which bridges into WSL2 for you.

It asked to paste multiple lines Expected — the command in Step 1 is two lines. Run them one at a time.

Getting help

If you are still stuck, include the output of wsl -l -v and the full installer output when you get in touch. Those two together identify almost every failure on this path.