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WINDOWS BUILD NOTES

Below are some notes on how to build Bitcoin Core for Windows.

The options known to work for building Bitcoin Core on Windows are:

Other options which may work, but which have not been extensively tested are (please contribute instructions):

  • On Windows, using a POSIX compatibility layer application such as cygwin or msys2.

The instructions below work on Ubuntu and Debian. Make sure the distribution's g++-mingw-w64-x86-64-posix package meets the minimum required g++ version specified in dependencies.md.

Installing Windows Subsystem for Linux

Follow the upstream installation instructions, available here.

Cross-compilation for Ubuntu and Windows Subsystem for Linux

The steps below can be performed on Ubuntu or WSL. The depends system will also work on other Linux distributions, however the commands for installing the toolchain will be different.

First, install the general dependencies:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install cmake curl g++ git make pkg-config

A host toolchain (g++) is necessary because some dependency packages need to build host utilities that are used in the build process.

See dependencies.md for a complete overview.

If you want to build the Windows installer using the deploy build target, you will need NSIS:

sudo apt install nsis

Acquire the source in the usual way:

git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
cd bitcoin

Building for 64-bit Windows

The first step is to install the mingw-w64 cross-compilation toolchain:

sudo apt install g++-mingw-w64-x86-64-posix

Once the toolchain is installed the build steps are common:

Note that for WSL the Bitcoin Core source path MUST be somewhere in the default mount file system, for example /usr/src/bitcoin, AND not under /mnt/d/. If this is not the case the dependency autoconf scripts will fail. This means you cannot use a directory that is located directly on the host Windows file system to perform the build.

Build using:

gmake -C depends HOST=x86_64-w64-mingw32  # Use "-j N" for N parallel jobs.
cmake -B build --toolchain depends/x86_64-w64-mingw32/toolchain.cmake
cmake --build build     # Use "-j N" for N parallel jobs.
ctest --test-dir build  # Use "-j N" for N parallel tests. Some tests are disabled if Python 3 is not available.

Depends system

For further documentation on the depends system see README.md in the depends directory.

Installation

After building using the Windows subsystem it can be useful to copy the compiled executables to a directory on the Windows drive in the same directory structure as they appear in the release .zip archive. This can be done in the following way. This will install to c:\workspace\bitcoin, for example:

cmake --install build --prefix /mnt/c/workspace/bitcoin

You can also create an installer using:

cmake --build build --target deploy