Building GnuCash on Windows

This repository provides a simple, repeatable means to build GnuCash on Microsoft Windows using MinGW-W64, Gnome's jhbuild, and JRSoftware's Inno Setup. It is what drives building the official All-in-One installers and what the GnuCash core development team uses to create development environments.

Requirements

• Windows Vista or later. You must have an account with Administrator privileges.
• Powershell 3.0 or later. Note that Vista and Win7 provided only Powershell 2.0. Get an upgrade from Microsoft.

Installation

Download setup-mingw.ps1.

Start a Powershell session:

• Click the Start icon and start typing "powershell" until Windows recognizes it and presents a menu item. Click that.

If you need Administrative Privileges:

• Win10, right-click on the Start icon and select Windows Powershell (Admin)
• Win7, click the Start icon and start typing "powershell" until Windows PowerShell appears in the search dialog. Right-click on it and select Run as Administrator.

If you don't routinely run PowerShell scripts on your computer you will need to first set the Execution Policy to RemoteSigned. You will need Powershell session with Administrative Privileges for this step:

1. Start Powershell with Admin Privileges
2. Run set-executionpolicy -executionpolicy RemoteSigned -scope LocalMachine
3. Quit Powershell if you plan to run setup-mingw64.ps1 without Administrative Privileges.

In a PowerShell session run path/to/setup-mingw64.ps1; the path will depend on your browser settings but if you have a default setup then it's ~/Downloads/setup-mingw64.ps1.

setup-mingw64 Options

setup-mingw64.ps1 takes four optional arguments:

• -target_dir: The full path to where the MinGW-W64 environment will be created. Default: C:\gcdev64. The default requires Administrative privileges to create. If you use a directory in your home directory instead then you will not require Admin privileges.

• -download_dir: The name of the subdirectory in target_dir where source tarballs will be downloaded to. Default: target_dir\downloads.

• -msyw2_root: The base directory of the MSYS2/MinGW-W64 environment. You can reuse an existing environment, but we don't recommend changing this. Default:target_dir\msys2.

• -x86_64: Setting this will build a 64-bit GnuCash. Default: Unset, for 32-bit builds able to run on older systems.

It will take a while to complete. When it's done you'll have a new group in your Start Menu named MSYS2 64bit or MSYS2 32bit depending on the bitness of your version of Windows. Note that this is independent of whether you set the -x86_64 option. In that group you'll find 3 selections:

• MSYS2 MSys2
• MSYS2 MingGW 32-bit
• MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit

These create terminal emulation sessions running the Bash shell with the environment configured for different uses. You will nearly always want to use the MinGW with the bitness you selected.

Building GnuCash

1. Start an MSYS MinGW shell for the selected bitness.
2. Change directories to the installation directory cd /c/gcdev64/src/gnucash-on-windows.git. Substitute the path if you set -target_dir to something else. Note that in this shell you'll use /c instead of C: for the drive letter.
3. run TARGET=gnucash-stable jhbuild -f jhbuildrc build to build the stable branch. Substitute gnucash-release for gnucash-stable to build the latest release from the tarball. In the run-up to a major release there will be an unstable branch for beta testing; to build that use gnucash-unstable.

Developing

Once you've built GnuCash all the way through you can get a build-and-run environment by starting a MinGW shell and running TARGET=gnucash-maint jhbuild -f jhbuildrc shell from the gnucash-on-windows.git directory.

cd $PREFIX/../build/gnucash-git to get to the build directory and cd $PREFIX/../src/gnucash-git to get to the local repo.

To install the gdb debugger run pacman -Su gdb. You need not be in a jhbuild shell.

Bundling GnuCash

1. Start a Powershell session.
2. Change to the installation directory cd C:\gcdev64\src\gnucash-on-windows.git
3. run

bundle-mingw64.ps1 -root_dir C:\gcdev64 -target_dir C:\gcdev64\gnucash\maint -package maint -git_build $true

That will create a date-stamped and versioned gnucash-xxx-setup.exe in C:\gcdev64\gnucash\maint. You'll need to adjust paths and versions accordingly if you changed target_dir when you ran setup-mingw64.ps1 or built master instead of maint.

bundle-mingw64.ps1 Parameters

All Parameters are required and have no defaults.

• -root_dir The root directory of the installation, corresponds to target_dir for setup-mingw64.ps1.
• -target_dir The directory where the source, build, and installation directories are. This is normally target_dir\gnucash\branch with branch being either master, maint, or release.
• -package: The thing we're bundling. Always gnucash.
• -git_build: $true if GnuCash was built from git, $false otherwise. Only use $false for release builds.

Buildserver

This repository includes a script, buildserver\build_package.ps1 that combines building and bundling GnuCash and uploading the result to a distribution webserver into a single command. It's intended for automated nightly build scripts.

build_package.ps1 options

• -branch: maint, master, or release. The last builds the release configured in gnucash.modules from the release tarball.
• -target_dir: The target_dir configured into setup-mingw64.ps1.
• -hostname: The upload URI. Optional. If set the script will attempt to rsync the gnucash-xxx-setup.exe and the build log to hard-coded subdirectories under this URI. The user running the script must have correctly configured ssh to connect to the URI with a key; there's no provision for password authentication.

Other files:

• jhbuildrc.in Template jhbuild configuration file, converted to jhbuildrc by setup-mingw64.ps1 with the target_dir.
• gnucash.modules: The jhbuild moduleset for building GnuCash.
• inno_setup/: Configuration and localization files for building gnucash-xxx-setup.exe with Inno Setup.
• patches/: Modifications to the source packages required to build in this environment.
• extra_dist/: The Online Quote Installation tool.
• exetype.pl: A perl script for converting the executable type of programs between Windowed and Console. It is sometimes useful to convert the GnuCash executable to Console type (it's built as Windowed) to capture some text output it emits before logging starts.