Get Involved/development/Windows

Craft is a tool to build the sources and its third-party requirements. It is the easy way to build software.

A screen recording version is available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOw3KZ0pv_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7D7dkYWSWU

System requirements

The versions of Microsoft Windows operating system (OS) that are still supported by Microsoft include Windows Server greater than or equal to 2016 and Windows greater than or equal to 10. See https://endoflife.date/windows

Setting up craft

Installing python

While Craft is capable of installing an embedded Python version sufficient for most packages, we recommend a full installation of Python. Python is currently releasing new versions in the Python 3 series. Download Python 3.x

Setting up a powershell

PowerShell is required to be at least version 5.0. If you're running Windows 10 you most probably won't need to update Powershell.

You can check the version by invocating $PSVersionTable.PSVersion in a PowerShell terminal.

In case you need a newer one, we recommend PowerShell Core.

The latest version of the standard powershell can be found here.

Setting up a compiler

Currently, Craft supports both the MinGW and Microsoft Visual Studio (msvc) compiler. While MinGW can be installed by Craft, Visual Studio must be installed independently by the user.

Please note that in case you or the package you are a trying to build needs QtWebEngine, you'll have to use Visual Studio(!). MinGW is not supported.

For Visual Studio, currently, only version 2019 is supported. E.g. Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2019. Possible download links https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/releases/2019/history

Make sure the following components are selected at the minimum:

• Desktop Development with C++
• C++ ATL
• Windows SDK

(Optional) Direct X SDK (only for MinGW setups)

(You can skip this step if you plan to use the binary cache which is enable by default, Direct X SDK is only needed during building)

If you are using the MinGW compiler, in order to compile the Qt5 qtbase package you will also need to install the Microsoft DirectX SDK. Make sure to open a new command line window after the installation for the environment variables to be set.

Enable development mode

Windows 10 supports the creation of symbolic links, but only if the development mode is activated. Allowing symbolic links allows faster (much faster) extraction of archives. Enable development mode

Installing Craft

1. Start a PowerShell environment (Do not use PowerShell ISE, it doesn't work very well with python). It might be required to run it as administrator.
2. Allow execution of powershell scripts by executing the following command:

   Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned

3. Install Craft and follow the instructions by executing the following command:

   iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/KDE/craft/master/setup/install_craft.ps1'))

4. Performance. Configure your antivirus to exclude the entire craft root directory (C:\CraftRoot\). Otherwise build of some packages can fail (e.g. build of kde/frameworks/tier2/kdoctools when AVG is used). E.g. if this a Windows 10 Pro virtual machine and you want maximum performance you can open "Edit group policy", then you can turn off "Microsoft Defender Antivirus" and disable "Windows Update > Configure Automatic Updates"; open "Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security" and turn off all 3 firewall profiles.

Using Craft

To use Craft you need to start a powershell window, point that to KDEROOT\craft and run the initialization script.

C:\CraftRoot\craft\craftenv.ps1

This tells Craft about your environment settings (e.g. paths). It will load your configuration from CraftRoot\etc\CraftSettings.ini. If there are any error messages Craft will not work as expected. The output should look similar to this one (of course with your paths):

Craft               : C:\CraftRoot
Version             : master
ABI                 : windows-cl-msvc2019-x86_64
Download directory  : C:\CraftRoot\download

Then start crafting

Troubleshooting

If craft seems stalled for prolonged period of time, you may want need hit Enter in the Powershell terminal to give it a nudge.

Download Windows

You can download Microsoft Windows 11 from https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11

E.g. Download the .ISO file. Then install it in a virtual machine. One way to do this is via "Virtual Machine Manager"/qemu/kvm. It will require TPM, you can either use swtpm or disable the requirement entirely by changing registry values in the installer. A screen recording version is available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHK_z_vVCjQ

Virtual Machines

If you don't have windows - not to worry! Grab one of Microsoft's VM for development.

• Get a VM
  • Windows VM https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines/
    • This VM comes with Visual Studio 2022 pre-installed as well as a whole bunch of other crap you may or may not need. You need to install VS 2019

to install modules needed to build KDE software. @sitter suggests this

• Import into VM software + install guest addons if necessary and applicable
• In windows search the start menu for 'Visual Studio Installer' and start it
• Install VS 2019 and select the components mentioned on the Craft page. For particularly easy access you can simply pick the 'desktop development with c++' and 'linux development with c++' workloads instead of the individual components. The "Visual Studio Installer" (on the start menu) is installed as part of VS 2022 and can also manage the install of VS2019.
• Setup Craft as described above

Advanced

Setup Visual Studio 2019 with Chocolatey

• choco install -y visualstudio2019buildtools --package-parameters "--add  Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.ATL"

• choco install -y visualstudio2019-workload-vctools visualstudio2019-workload-nativedesktop visualstudio2019-workload-manageddesktopbuildtools

• choco install -y windows-sdk-10