wiki:BuildingOnWindows

Version 15 (modified by Adam Roben, 16 years ago) (diff)

Added a note about Release build being broken in VC++ Express

Building on Windows

Visual C++ Express users: If you are building the Release configuartion, you must turn off Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO). To do so, run the following command from the Cygwin prompt before building:

sed -i -e 's/LinkTimeCodeGeneration="4"/LinkTimeCodeGeneration="1"/' ~/WebKit/WebKit/win/WebKit.vcproj/WebKit.vcproj

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

Note that it is safest to build WebKit in your Cygwin home directory. At the moment, there seems to be an implicit assumption in the build scripts that paths will be relative to the home directory.

Building from within Visual Studio

WebKit can be built from within Visual Studio by setting two environment variables:

  • WEBKITOUTPUTDIR - An absolute Windows-style path pointing to the directory where you want the build products to go.
  • WEBKITLIBRARIESDIR - An absolute Windows-style path pointing to the WebKitLibraries/win folder in your WebKit checkout.

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.)