Building on Windows

Follow the instructions on ​http://webkit.org/building/tools.html to install the necessary developer tools, support libraries, and check out the WebKit code.

Common Build Errors

Error spawning cmd.exe

Sometimes, Visual Studio complains that it 'cannot spawn cmd.exe'. Should this happen, check if both your Cygwin\bin folder and c:\windows\sytem32 are both in the Visual Studio list of executable files (Tools -> Options -> VC++ Directories).

Bad line endings

When you see errors in WebCore/css/makeprops or WebCore/css/maketokenizer, open those files in a suitable editor (SciTE works) and convert the line endings to LF only (Unix-style). Then restart the build.

Visual C++ Express Edition

1>c:\cygwin\home\admin\webkit\javascriptcore\wtf\assertions.cpp(45) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'windows.h': No such file or directory

If you see errors like this you probably need to install the ​platform SDK.

Running the tests

After successfully building WebKit, in order to run the tests you need to copy the DLLs from C:\Program Files\Safari\ into your WebKitBuild\bin folder, otherwise testkjs won't run properly. When you are doing this, be careful not to overwrite the WebKit.dll file in WebKitBuild\bin with the one in C:\Program Files\Safari. (If you use the DOS copy command, it will ask you before overwriting.)

Areas needing improvement

TODO: fill me in?

• Describe DLL registration step