Okay, what these scripts will do is setup only your development environment. On the other hand, osquery by default expects a folder structure in place as created by the installation msi . That is causing the issue. You can either install osquery and point your build output binary to use the folder structure thus created or you can override the paths of the pidfile, config_path, database_path, log_dir to that of your choice by overriding them in a osquery.flags file and passing the path of that flag file as an arg to osqueryd with the --flagfile parameter. Installation instructions are here: https://osquery.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installation/install-windows/