Build Geany on Windows (using MSYS2)

Msys2 is a successor to msys which offers a unix-like environment on Windows combined with a pacman-based package manager. It's purpose is to simplify win32 compiliations, and it's doing great at that for GTK+ stack and related projects. In fact, it's so good it should become the default method of compiling Geany on Windows.

See http://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/ and http://msys2.github.io/

This page aims at showing how to use msys2 to build Geany on Windows, both GTK+2 and GTK+3 versions.

Download the installer from here. Chose the 32bit or 64bit version depending on your Windows version, not whether you target a 32bit or 64bit compilation of Geany (this guide will always compile for 32bit).

Run the installer and follow the instructions. In the following we will assume that you installed the 32bit version to C:\mingw32.

After installation, open the msys2 environment via Start Menu → All Programs → MSYS2 32bit → MinGW-w64 Win32 Shell

Next, execute:

pacman --needed -Sy bash pacman pacman-mirrors msys2-runtime

Now exit and re-open the msys2 environment and perform a system update:

pacman -Su

Restart msys2 once more, in case pacman -Su updated environment related packages.

Finally, install the dependencies needed by Geany.

# toolchain
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-binutils mingw-w64-i686-gcc mingw-w64-i686-gdb
# make and Autotools
pacman -S make pkgconfig autoconf automake libtool intltool
# gtk familiy
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-gtk2 mingw-w64-i686-gtk3
# for building html docs
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-python2 mingw-w64-i686-python2-docutils
# and if you fancy building from git
pacman -S git
# necessary for GTK bundle and installer steps
pacman -S rsync

At last, you want to add C:\msys32\mingw32\bin to your PATH environment variable, in order to run Geany from the Windows Explorer.

In case you want also compile the combined Geany-Plugins collection, you need the following dependencies:

# geany-plugins dependencies
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-check mingw-w64-i686-enchant mingw-w64-i686-lua51 mingw-w64-i686-gpgme mingw-w64-i686-libsoup mingw-w64-i686-libgit2 mingw-w64-i686-gtkspell mingw-w64-i686-webkitgtk2 mingw-w64-i686-webkitgtk3

This is effectively the same procedure as cross-compiling on Linux. You can either clone the source code from the GIT repository or download a release tarball (1.27 or later) and unpack it.

curl -L -o geany-master.zip https://github.com/geany/geany/archive/master.zip
unzip geany-master.zip
cd geany-master
# autogen.sh is not needed for tarballs!
NOCONFIGURE=1 ./autogen.sh
# configure and make take a while, don't panic
./configure --enable-gtk3 --prefix=/c/geany
make -j2
make install

After that, you can run Geany either through msys2 shell (/c/geany/bin/geany) or use the Windows Explorer to locate the executable and run it.

The first run should look like this, on GTK+ 3.18.6

This is effectively the same procedure as cross-compiling on Linux. You can either clone the source code from the GIT repository or download a release tarball (1.27 or later) and unpack it.

curl -L -o geany-master.zip https://github.com/geany/geany/archive/master.zip
unzip geany-master.zip
cd geany-master
# autogen.sh is not needed for tarballs!
NOCONFIGURE=1 ./autogen.sh
# configure and make take a while, don't panic
./configure --prefix=/c/geany
make -j2
make install

After that, you can run Geany either through msys2 shell (/c/geany/bin/geany) or use the Windows Explorer to locate the executable and run it.

The first run should look like this, on GTK+ 2.24.28

In order to run Geany and/or create an installer for distribution, you need a GTK runtime environment. There is simple script which downloads all necessary packages and unpack them in an automated way.

After you have run the scripts as described below, you should copy the resulting files and directories all into your Geany installation directory if you want to use it directly for your own Geany installation. In case you want to create an installer, leave the directories as they are and read on.

The script is available at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geany/geany/master/scripts/gtk-bundle-from-msys2.sh.

To run it, simply create a new directory where the GTK runtime environment should be unpacked and change into this directory. Then call the script and wait a bit. It will download all necessary MSYS2 packages and extract them. Finally it will download the sources for *grep* and then compile *grep*.

cd
curl -L -o geany-gtk-bundle-from-msys2.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geany/geany/master/scripts/gtk-bundle-from-msys2.sh
mkdir /h/geany-bundle
cd /h/geany-bundle
bash ~/geany-gtk-bundle-from-msys2.sh -2
rsync -a --delete /h/geany-bundle/ ~/geany/gtk/

There are a few command line options for this script. Run it with “-h” for details. The most important option is “-2” and “-3” which defines the GTK version to be used.

The trailing “rsync” command is only necessary if you intend to create an installer later on.

For Geany-Plugins, the process is quite similar. The script for Geany-Plugins is available at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geany/geany-plugins/master/build/gtk-bundle-from-msys2.sh.

cd
curl -L -o geany-plugins-gtk-bundle-from-msys2.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geany/geany-plugins/master/build/gtk-bundle-from-msys2.sh
mkdir /h/geany-plugins-bundle
cd /h/geany-plugins-bundle
bash ~/geany-plugins-gtk-bundle-from-msys2.sh -2
rsync -a --delete /h/geany-plugins-bundle/ ~/geany-plugins/contrib/

The trailing “rsync” command is only necessary if you intend to create an installer later on.

When creating releases, you always should make sure your GIT working tree is clean and maybe temporarily rename “.git” to make “./configure” think that you don't want to build a debug release. Alernatively, download a release source tarball, unpack it and use it to compile Geany resp. Geany-Plugins.

Build instructions to build Geany in order to create a Windows installer (within MSYS2 shell):

DESTINATON=/h
VERSION="1.28"
cd ~/geany
make distclean
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=${DESTINATON}/geany_install --disable-silent-rules
make -j 2
make install
make DESTDIR=${DESTINATON}/geany install
rsync -a --delete ${DESTINATON}/geany/h/geany_install/ ~/geany/geany-${VERSION}/

The used destination here is “/h” which is the MSYS2 way to address H:\. You can use any other location as installation target. Then we compile Geany and install it normally and additionally using DESTDIR to another location. The normal installation is for Geany-Plugins so they can easily find the Geany installation while the DESTDIR installation is used to move the installed files into the source directory back for the installer creation.

This process can probably be optimized and shortened but for now it works this way.

The following actually creates the installer. The installer script expects that you have Python and NSIS 2.x (http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Download) installed in your normal Windows system (not in MSYS2). In the future, it would be cool to build the installer from within the MSYS2 environment but currently only NSIS 3.0 Beta is available in MSYS2.

For the following steps, a little Python is necessary to automate the further installer creation. The script can be downloaded here: geany-release.py.txt Open the script in your editor of choice and change paths at the beginning of the script as needed.

The script will also use SignCode to add digital signatures to the created binaries and installers. Either setup a working SignCode installation or comment out the signing calls at the end of the script.

Finally, start a Windows console session (Start→Run→cmd.exe) and execute:

cd c:\msys64\home\<username>\geany
python ..\geany-release.py

This will strip and sign all binaries (geany.exe and various .dll files) and also convert documentation text files to CRLF format. At the end, you should get two installer executables in ~/geany.

Build instructions to build Geany-Plugins in order to create a Windows installer (within MSYS2 shell):

DESTINATON=/h
VERSION="1.28"
cd ~/geany-plugins
make distclean
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=${DESTINATON}/geany_install --with-geany-libdir=${DESTINATON}/geany_install/lib --disable-silent-rules
make -j 2
make install
make DESTDIR=${DESTINATON}/geany-plugins install
rsync -a --delete ${DESTINATON}/geany-plugins/h/geany_install/ ~/geany-plugins/geany-plugins-${VERSION}/

For the following steps, a little Python is necessary to automate the further installer creation. The script can be downloaded here: geany-plugins-release.py.txt Open the script in your editor of choice and change paths at the beginning of the script as needed.

The script will also use SignCode to add digital signatures to the created binaries and installers. Either setup a working SignCode installation or comment out the signing calls at the end of the script.

Finally, start a Windows console session (Start→Run→cmd.exe) and execute:

cd c:\msys64\home\<username>\geany-plugins
python ..\geany-plugins-release.py

This will strip and sign all binaries (various .dll files) and also convert documentation text files to CRLF format. At the end, you should get an installer executable in ~/geany-plugins.

TODO