Jina on Windows

You can install and use Jina on Windows.

However, Jina is built keeping *nix-based platforms in mind, and the upstream libraries that Jina depends on also follow the similar ideology. Hence, there are some caveats when running Jina on Windows. If you face additional issues, please let us know.

Caution

There can be a significant performance impact while running Jina on Windows. You may not want to use it in production.

Tip

Alternatively, you can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux for better compatibility. Check the official guide here. Make sure you install WSL2. Once done, you can install Jina as on a native *nix platform.

Known issues

multiprocessing spawn

Jina relies heavily on multiprocessing to enable scaling & distribution. Windows only supports spawn start method for multiprocessing, which has a few caveats. Please follow the guidelines here.

Compatibility of Executors in the Hub

We’ve added preliminary support for using Executors listed in the Hub portal. Note that, these Executors are based on *nix OS and might not be compatible to run natively on Windows. Containers that are built on Windows are not yet supported.

See also

Install Docker Desktop on Windows

JinaD is not supported

We haven’t added support for JinaD on Windows. If you can make it work, feel free to create a PR.

Limited support for DocumentArrayMemmap

Even though support for DocumentArrayMemmap has been added, it is still error-prone. Please proceed with caution.

Memory watermark is unavailable

Since Windows doesn’t support resource module, memory watermark checks are disabled by default.

UnicodeEncodeError on Jina CLI

  1. UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u25ae' in position : character maps to <undefined>

Set environment variable PYTHONIOENCODING='utf-8' before starting your Python script.