It doesn’t work on Windows, because the npm package for go-ipfs doesn’t work on Windows (See here). Therefore, “npm install” will fail because it can’t get that dependency.
I tried compiling go-ipfs manually following these instructions.
I successfully compiled it, but npm doesn’t seem to know that it exists. And now I’m stuck, because I know next to nothing about how NodeJS and npm actually works. Maybe there’s a method to manually get npm to install go-ipfs from the compiled version? I don’t know.
I probably should have explained in the beginning of my post that my first steps were to just follow the instructions for Linux and see what happens.
So I cloned the Github repo, changed the branch, and ran npm install
Of course, it didn’t work. So I looked through the output, and it looks like the errors were caused by one dependency that npm couldn’t install: go-ipfs-dep
It’s just a package that the browser needs to compile, because beaker uses IPFS too. Since that package couldn’t be installed via npm, I just compiled that individual go-ipfs package by itself, which is where I got stuck because I wasn’t sure how to make npm use my compiled version to fulfill the dependency (or if such a thing is even possible… Like I said, I don’t much about how npm works and what it can do)
Edit: Here’s my output from running npm install in the beaker directory. I snipped out what looked like irrelevant output, and hid my log-in name…