msys2

Build using the Msys2 tool.

Initial installation and set-up

This build method for Windows, uses the Msys2 tool. Msys2 provides a Linux like development environment with a wide range of open source development tools and pre-packaged libraries. It comes with a package installer (based on Arch Linux pacman) that is easy use and makes it easy to keep your environment up to date.

First, visit the Msys2 website https://www.msys2.org/, then download and run the installer. Accept the defaults following the steps described on the site. When complete, you will have the basic environment installed and up to date.

Msys provides a Linux-like terminal environment with three terminal types. The default terminal is generic (not specific to the processor architecture) and cannot be used to build code. The other types are for building 32-bit or 64-bit applications. You can select the specific build terminal from the Msys launcher which can always be opened with a right-click of the Msys icon.

The set-up and build scripts provided in this repo must be run from either the 32-bit or 64-bit terminal. Open a terminal of the type needed for the client version you want to build and use that going forwards.

Now, install the git package so you can download the github repository that holds the setup scripts and the scripts to build the client.

pacman -S git

You can now clone this repository which will enable you to use the client set-up and build scripts.

cd ~/
git clone https://github.com/pjbroad/el-build-methods.git

To complete initial set-up, run the provided set-up script. Accept the defaults, this will take some time as over 100 packages will be installed. These include the c/c++ build environment and all the packages needed to build the client.

cd ~/el-build-methods/windows-10/msys2
./setup.bash

Now and in the future, you can update your Msys2 environment and all the packaged libraries you just installed using a single command: pacman -Syu.

Building additional libraries

We need to build libraries required by the client that are not available from the Msys2 package manager.

cd ~/el-build-methods/windows-10/msys2
./build-libraries.bash

Building the client

Now we can build the client. This step can be repeated if you make changes to the client code. When run for the first time, the script downloads the source code from git into a local repository. You can keep this copy up to date using standard git commands.

cd ~/el-build-methods/windows-10/msys2
./build-client.bash dev

This script builds the client, then creates a date-tagged zip file containing the client executable and all the required DLL files. You can unzip this file into a pre-installed client directory to use your new build. You can build either a development dev version that contains debug symbols and a version string tagged with the build date, or a release rel version that uses full optimisation and the current release version string.

The created zip file is located in the ~/build directory. From the Windows file explorer, this directory can be found using, for example, C:\msys64\home\Paul\build.

To remove the build directory, you can specify the clean parameter for the build script, then re-build as before.

cd ~/el-build-methods/windows-10/msys2
./build-client.bash dev clean

Updating the client code

Assuming you used the provided scripts, the client code will be located in ~/build/elc. You can update the code using git pull or switch to a tagged release using, for example git checkout 1.9.5.8, then re-run the build script to build a new version.

The built code is located a sub-directory of the source directory named, for example mingw-w64-x86_64-dev. A different directory is used for development and release builds.

Have fun, and help improve this information and scripts by offering pull requests.