Inform 7 CLI error: "no language of play"

Authoring Inform 7
1

I’m trying to follow the I7 wiki on command line usage, but I’m having issues even with the basic “Hello world” example.

When running it exactly as it is on the wiki, with the story file consisting of only To begin: say "Hello world." and command line parameters being inform7 -basic storyfile.i7, the error I get is the following:

An internal error has occurred: no language of play. The error was
detected at line 497 of "inbuild/supervisor-module/Chapter 5/Project
Services.w". This should never happen, and I am now halting in abject
failure.
What has happened here is that one of the checks Inform carries out
internally, to see if it is working properly, has failed. There must be a
bug in this copy of Inform. It may be worth checking whether you have the
current, up-to-date version. If so, please report this problem via
www.inform7.com/bugs. As for fixing your source text to avoid this bug,
the last thing you changed is probably the cause, if there is a simple
cause. Your source text might in fact be wrong, and the problem might be
occurring because Inform has failed to find a good way to say so. But even
if your source text looks correct, there are probably rephrasings which
would achieve the same effect.

I’m on Windows 10, using Inform 10.1.2 installed from github releases. I’ve added the compiler folder to the path variable in Windows.

I’ve also noticed that the wiki assumes I7 compiler to be installed in unix-style inform7/Tangled/ folder while on windows all compilers are in C:\Program Files\Inform\Compilers folder. I have no idea if that is related to the error.

Do I need to install anything else besides the IDE to get command line interface up and running?

2

try adding -inbuild-verbosity=2 and see what it says.

try adding -internal path/to/somethingendingwith/inform7/Internal [I don’t know where that ends up on Windows…]

3

It works now, thanks!

For anybody else who might be wondering, the correct working syntax on Windows is:
inform7 -internal "C:\Program Files\Inform\Internal" storyfile.i7

This assumes that the Inform IDE is installed in the default location, and that Inform7 compilers folder is added to the Windows PATH variable.
Compilers folder is located at "C:\Program Files\Inform\Compilers" by default.

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