magic-wormhole Is a CLI program to quickly, securely, and easily transfer files from one computer to another. I thought the README.md for magic-wormhole was lacking some details on how to install the program on Windows. This sort of thing is probably obvious to any Windows Python dev, but I’m a Linux guy so I was a little confused. Here is the process I used to get magic-wormhole installed on Windows 7.

Step 1. Install Python

It is important to install Python version 2.7 rather than 3.0. 3.0 may work fine, but the magic-wormhole readme suggests version 2. When installing Python, make sure to enable the option, “Add Python.exe to path”

Optional: If you use Chocolatey (recommended), you can install python 2.7 with choco install -y python2

Step 2. Run PowerShell as Administrator.

Easy way, hit the start button and type “powershell”, then right click on that program and click “Run as Administrator”.

Once powershell pops up, go ahead and change directories to somewhere such as your desktop–

cd C:\Users\xxxx\Desktop

Step 3. Upgrade Python Package Manager (pip)

This was required for me because only more recent versions of pip was successful at installing certain dependencies for magic-wormhole.

pip install --upgrade pip

Step 4. Install magic-wormhole via python package manager

pip install magic-wormhole

Step 5. Use magic-wormhole

In PowerShell, simply run the following command–

wormhole /?

This command will show you the command line usage of magic-wormhole, which is now installed. Enjoy.