Below are some notes on how to build Bitcoin Core for Windows.
The options known to work for building Bitcoin Core on Windows are:
- On Linux, using the Mingw-w64 cross compiler tool chain.
- On Windows, using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Mingw-w64.
- On Windows, using Microsoft Visual Studio. See
build-windows-msvc.md
.
Other options which may work, but which have not been extensively tested are (please contribute instructions):
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.
Follow the upstream installation instructions, available here.
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.
See README.md in the depends directory for which dependencies to install and dependencies.md for a complete overview.
If you want to build the Windows installer using the deploy
build target, you will need NSIS:
apt install nsis
Acquire the source in the usual way:
git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
cd bitcoin
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.
For further documentation on the depends system see README.md in the depends directory.
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