This article describes how to set up eAthena on a Windows system. There is also an article about setting up eAthena on Linux.

1. Download Cygwin from http://www.cygwin.com/
2. Find something to keep you busy, because the next step will take a while
3. Install Cygwin. Select "install from Internet" as download source. When you are on the component select screen make sure the component category "devel" is installed. You technically need not everything from this group but a lot. So just install the whole group.
4. Start Cygwin
5. Browse to the directory where you would like to have eAthena. When you want it in c:/tmw, for example, the command would be cd /cygdrive/c/tmw/ (directory must exist. when it does not you can create it with mkdir /cygdrive/c/tmw/)
6. Enter git clone git://gitorious.org/tmw-eathena/mainline.git eathena to download the most recent sourcecode of the server.
7. Enter git clone git://gitorious.org/tmw-eathena-data/mainline.git eathena-data to download the most recent game content for the server.
8. Enter cd eathena to browse into the newly created eathena directory
9. Enter make to compile the sourcecode. You can close Cygwin when it is finished, because the rest can be done with normal Windows tools.
10. Now you have to copy the content files from the directory eathena-data to the directory eathena. Copy everything but the directory .git and the files .gitignore and .mailmap.
11. Copy cygwin1.dll and cygz.dll into the eathena directory. You find them in the subdirectory /bin of your cygwin installation.
12. Configure eAthena:
    1. Rename the file save/account.txt.example to save/account.txt
    2. Rename the file conf/login_local.conf.example to conf/login_local.conf
    3. Open the file conf/char_local.conf.example with a text editor, enter 127.0.0.1 for the IP address of login- and mapserver and save it as conf/char_local.conf (without ".example")
    4. Open the file conf/map_local.conf.example with a text editor, enter 127.0.0.1 for the IP address of login- and charserver and save it as conf/map_local.conf (without ".example")
13. Start the programs login-server.exe, map-server.exe and char-server.exe. When one of them closes immediately after you start it you should try to start it from the command prompt to see the error messages before the window closes.

You should now be able to connect to your server by starting your TMW client and entering "127.0.0.1" as server. Before you announce your server publically for others to play on you should change the server account passwords in accounts.txt, conf/char_local.conf and conf/map_local.conf to avoid abuse. Register a new character through your client to confirm if everything is working properly.