Building Guitar on Windows (original) (raw)

Building Guitar on Windows

This guide provides step-by-step instructions for building Guitar, a cross-platform Git GUI client, on Windows using Visual Studio and Qt.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you’ll need to install the following software:

Building Process

1. Set Up the Development Environment

Open a command prompt with Visual Studio environment variables:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat"

2. Clone the Repository

Clone the Guitar repository:

git clone https://github.com/soramimi/Guitar.git
cd Guitar

3. Run the Preparation Script

The preparation script sets up the build environment:

ruby prepare.rb

4. Build the zlib Dependency

Guitar requires zlib to be built first:

rmdir /s /q build
mkdir build
cd build
c:\Qt\6.9.0\msvc2022_64\bin\qmake.exe ..\zlib.pro
C:\Qt\Tools\QtCreator\bin\jom\jom.exe
cd ..

Note: Adjust the Qt path according to your installation.

5. Build the libmagic Dependency

Guitar uses libmagic for file type detection and requires it to be statically linked for consistent cross-platform behavior. Run the provided build script:

cd filetype
build-msvc.bat
cd ..

This script will automatically build all required libmagic components including libfile, liboniguruma, and libfiletype.

6. Build Guitar

Now build the main application:

rmdir /s /q build
mkdir build
cd build
c:\Qt\6.9.0\msvc2022_64\bin\qmake.exe ../Guitar.pro
C:\Qt\Tools\QtCreator\bin\jom\jom.exe
cd ..

7. Prepare the Executable

Finally, set up the executable with required dependencies:

cd _bin
del libz.lib
7z e ..\misc\win32tools.zip
C:\Qt\6.9.0\msvc2022_64\bin\windeployqt.exe Guitar.exe

This uses the Qt deployment tool to copy all required Qt libraries to the application folder.

8. Running Guitar

After successful completion, you can run Guitar from the _bin directory:

Guitar.exe