Windows Development Environment

Windows Development Environment

This page describes how to setup a development environment for boot on windows. Please fill in missing steps!

Git

Obviously you will need git. Get it from https://msysgit.github.io/ In the installer choose the option to install the git exeutable wrappers on the PATH.

MinGW/MSYS

MinGW provides a bash shell and GNU tools for windows. Download the installer from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/Installer/mingw-get-setup.exe/download and choose to install at least mingw-base, msys, make and wget.

Maven

Download maven from https://maven.apache.org/ and unpack it into a directory that doesn't have spaces in it's filename. I choose C:\opt\maven-x.y.z

Launch4j

Download and install from http://launch4j.sourceforge.net/ to C:\opt\launch4j. Rename the Launch4j.exe to old-Launch4j.exe and copy Launch4jc.exe to Launch4j.exe. The reason is that the Makefile uses the name launch4j in order to call Launch4j. That works on Linux. But on Windows the executable is called Launch4jc.exe.

Configure HOME environment variable

I always set the HOME environment variable. MinGW uses that to decide where your home directory is. Set it to something like C:\Users\USERNAME\home and create that directory.

Create a .profile file

Create a .profile in $HOME. I have the following

export PATH="~/bin:/c/opt/Launch4j/:~/opt/apache-maven-3.2.5/bin:/c/Program Files/Java/jdk1.8.0_25/bin/:$PATH"

Start a MSYS Shell

msys can now be started by double-clicking C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\msys.bat (if you chose the default install path).

Now check that running the following commands work:

mvn --version

(This will complain about "which: readlink: unknown command". Ignore that)

make --version
launch4j --version
git --version

Now clone the boot repository and run

make deps
make install

to build and install boot.