Enabling Windows File Path Limit Beyond 260 Characters

I was trying to install a Python package when I encountered the following error:

C:\Users\MATT-THINKPAD\OneDrive - nyu.edu\Documents\fido-1.6.1\fido-1.6.1>pip install setuptools
Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writeable
Collecting setuptools
  Using cached setuptools-75.5.0-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (6.8 kB)
Using cached setuptools-75.5.0-py3-none-any.whl (1.2 MB)
Installing collected packages: setuptools
ERROR: Could not install packages due to an OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\\Users\\MATT-THINKPAD\\AppData\\Local\\Packages\\PythonSoftwareFoundation.Python.3.12_qbz5n2kfra8p0\\LocalCache\\local-packages\\Python312\\site-packages\\pkg_resources\\tests\\data\\my-test-package_unpacked-egg\\my_test_package-1.0-py3.7.egg\\EGG-INFO\\dependency_links.txt'

It turns out that Windows 11 does not accept file paths over 260 characters by default and users may remove the character path limit by editing the registry.

  1. Open ‘Registry Editor’
  2. Navigate to ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem’
  3. Edit the value date of ‘LongPathsEnabled’ from ‘0’ to ‘1’