Installing Red on Windows

Needed Software

The following software dependencies can all be installed quickly and easily through powershell, using a trusted package manager for windows called Chocolatey

We also provide instructions for manually installing all of the dependencies.

Installing using powershell and chocolatey

To install via powershell, search “powershell” in the windows start menu, right-click on it and then click “Run as administrator”

Then run each of the following commands:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force
choco install git --params "/GitOnlyOnPath /WindowsTerminal" -y
choco install jre8 python -y; exit

Manually installing dependencies

  • Python - Red needs Python 3.7.0 or greater


Please make sure that the box to add Python to PATH is CHECKED, otherwise you may run into issues when trying to run Red


Please choose the option to “Run Git from the Windows Command Prompt” in Git’s setup

  • Java - needed for Audio


Please choose the “Windows Online” installer

Installing Red

  1. Open a command prompt (open Start, search for “command prompt”, then click it)
  2. Create and activate a virtual environment (strongly recommended), see the section Using venv
  3. Run one of the following commands, depending on what extras you want installed


If you’re not inside an activated virtual environment, include the --user flag with all pip commands.

  • No MongoDB support:

    python -m pip install -U Red-DiscordBot
  • With MongoDB support:

    python -m pip install -U Red-DiscordBot[mongo]


To install the development version, replace Red-DiscordBot in the above commands with the following link:


Setting Up and Running Red

After installation, set up your instance with the following command:


This will set the location where data will be stored, as well as your storage backend and the name of the instance (which will be used for running the bot).

Once done setting up the instance, run the following command to run Red:

redbot <your instance name>

It will walk through the initial setup, asking for your token and a prefix. You can find out how to obtain a token with this guide, section “Creating a Bot Account”.

You may also run Red via the launcher, which allows you to restart the bot from discord, and enable auto-restart. You may also update the bot from the launcher menu. Use the following command to run the launcher: