Setting up MSYS2 for Windows

This document is about building and compiling Freeciv21 with MSYS2 on Windows. MSYS2 is available from https://www.msys2.org. The Longturn Community builds the Windows Installer packages using MSYS2. If you are looking for a first class development environment on Windows, have a look at Visual Studio for Windows.

Setup

This chapter is about creating a new MSYS2 build environment.

  1. Download MSYS2 from their homepage: https://www.msys2.org/#installation

  2. Run the downloaded file to install MSYS2 on you build system. This author recommends that you install the files in a directory off of the root of your C:\ Drive. For example: C:\Tools

  3. Launch msys2_shell from the installation directory. Issue the following command to update the base set of packages.

    > pacman -Syuu

  4. The msys2_shell will close when this is complete. Run it again and install following packages with pacman -Su <package name>. The packages needed for building Freeciv21 are numerous. These packages are needed even if you do not plan to make the installer, update documentation, but only build Freeciv21 for local use.

  5. Install these arch independent packages that are needed for building Freeciv21. With these packages it is possible to build a Freeciv21 source tree that was created via release tarball or zip file.

    • pkgconf

    • git

    • automake

    • libtool

    • autoconf

    • patch

    • ed

    • python3

    • python-pip

    • make

    • clang

  6. Install these packages for building common parts.

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc (will give you bzip2, readline and python3)

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-gdb

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-curl

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-lua

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-tolua

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2_mixer

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-ninja

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-libunwind

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-make

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-python-pip

  7. Packages for building the client and/or Ruledit.

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-qt5

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-qt5-svg

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-karchive-qt5

  8. Package needed for building Windows installer package.

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-nsis

  9. Packages needed for documentation development.

    • mingw-w64-x86_64-python-sphinx

  10. Add some environment variables to the .bash_profile file. The code sample assumes x86_64.

export PATH=/mingw64/bin:${PATH}
export MSYSTEM=MINGW64
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=${PKG_CONFIG_PATH}:/mingw64/lib/pkgconfig:/mingw64/share/pkgconfig

Premade Environment

Visit https://github.com/jwrober/freeciv-msys2 to get a set of scripts and instructions to quickly build an environment. The scripts create an x86_64 development environment.

Build

Now that you have the environment setup. You can follow the steps in Compiling Freeciv21. MSYS2 in a Linux emulation environment on Windows, so the commands for git, cmake, etc. work the same.