build.windows.rst

windows build

The build currently expects MINGW64 environment, on a native windows host. A cross-compiling procedure (at least for the application binaries) should be possible in the near future, using mxe. (There's already some support for it in gui/build.sh).

You should instal: make, wget, as well as a recent Qt5 version (for instance, with chocolatey: choco install make && choco install wget).

(In order to avoid makefiles, you are welcome to submit a port of the build scripts using powershell or cscript - see the build.wsf script in openvpn-build for inspiration).

For the installer, install QtIFW for windows (tested with version 3.2.2).

Assuming you have the vendor path in place and correctly configured, all you need to do is make build_installer:

export PATH="/c/Qt/Qt5/bin/":"/c/Qt/QtIFW-3.2.2/bin":$PATH
export VENDOR_PATH=providers
make vendor && make installer

checking signatures

we should be signing all binaries on a release build.

to check the binaries have proper signatures, you can use the sigcheck utilities, part of the sysinternals suite:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysinternals-suite

unzip and place sigcheck.exe somewhere in your path.

make sure to pass -accepteula parameter on some manual run so that it does not ask again.

adding metadata to binaries

TODO: add metadata properly https://github.com/electron/rcedit/releases/tag/v1.1.1 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/284258/how-do-i-set-the-version-information-for-an-existing-exe-dll

the steps to do release signatures are:

make build
make dosign
make installer
make sign_installer

or alltogether as: