Get the full Codex app experience on Windows with a native agent sandbox and support for Windows developer environments in PowerShell.
With the Codex app on Windows, now you can:
• Work with multiple agents in parallel
• Manage long-running tasks
• Review diffs in one place
• Stay in your existing setup, without switching to WSL or VMs
To bring Codex to Windows, OpenAI built their first Windows-native agent sandbox.
It uses OS-level controls like restricted tokens, filesystem ACLs, and dedicated sandbox users so agents can safely run in real Windows developer environments like PowerShell.
Hi @elis, that error is actually pointing somewhere specific.
Codex is trying to create its local .codex\sqlite folder, and Windows is basically saying “nope” (permission denied). So it’s not really failing to install, it’s failing on first launch when setting up local storage.
A couple quick things to try:
Can you right-click Codex and run it as Administrator, just to see if it opens?
Does this error pop up immediately on launch, or after you select a workspace/project?
Also worth checking:
Is this a work/corporate-managed machine?
What Windows version are you on?
If you’re in a Business workspace, it’s also possible the workspace owner hasn’t enabled local Codex access yet, worth confirming that too. We were able to install and get prompted to add a project on our end, so this looks environment-specific. Let’s narrow it down from there.
That’s a lot of language telling the user to do work, when it seems pretty clear that the programming didn’t anticipate profile file paths with characters such as world users might input when it makes the local directory for the new obfuscated chat history storage.
symptom: el�s
could be: Elís (accented, local code page or UTF-16 code point character)
Pointing that you should act on bug reports: understand, replicate, escalate.
Potential Workaround:
Set CODEX_HOME environment variable to point to a user-writeable directory outside your user profile, see if the Windows app reads and respects that setting.
Log in with a different local account with English alphabet characters to use this program.
Investigate alternatives.
I was able to immediately replicate this fault by creating a new local user “elís” and attempting to install the quarter-of-a-gigabyte application from the Microsoft Store.
Awesome so far. I use VS Code + Codex daily and requre SSL into remote servers, if this software could do that, might never open VS Code again to use Codex
Thanks for getting it out and look forward to the future.
There are multiple issues reported on Github for this first launch issue when the local user folder has non-ascii character.
The underlying issue here seems to be related to how the app is handling reading userprofile file paths.
The codex_home environment variable workaround does work, but the app might still throw file path errors (like it did when prompting me to chose a project folder, trying to default to my desktop which was inside a folder with a non-ascii character.
Popup was shown immediately on launch yes. Running as admin did help, so now since it’s setup, I can open it normally. I’m on Windows 11, not a work-managed machine.
@_j is correct, the path is “Elís”. This causes problems all the time.
I’ve been experiencing troubles when trying to download the files that are supposed to be created by the agents and the skills.
Even when changing the global configurations, an dadding some WSL environments and subsystem for linux, the commands executions can’t really generate the PDF file.
This happens even after you prive full access and permissions o the computer.
Is there any way to see logs regarding the use of CODEX app within the ChatGPT subscription teams that we have?
Has some graphic bug on WIndows server 2022, almost unusable. On the first run left panel is not visible, just a black box. Tried on a couple of VMs, all the same. Any idea how to resolve it?
Hey, any update on the bug affecting anyone with special characters in their home folder trying to run the Codex App on Windows 11?
I’ve tried to record as much as I could on the bug report in github, but so far there’s not much in way of replies from any dev. I notice the electron wrapper code isn’t in this repo, so that might obviously be part of it.
, im so hyped
