Native Windows Builds

These are the standard instructions to build radare2 on Windows, keep reading for alternative methods below.

You can follow the r2book for a more complete guide.

Requirements

You will need:

Python 3 with pip3
Meson and ninja (pip3 install meson)
Visual Studio 2019 (2015 and 2022 should work too)

Compilation

The easiest way to build is by using the batch scripts:

preconfigure.bat
configure.bat
make.bat

The first one will setup the python and visual studio in PATH, you only need to run it once per console.

The second will run meson under the hood and create the b and vs directories to build using ninja or visual studio project.

Finally the make will run ninja and create the prefix directory containing all the distribution binaries, libraries and support files.

Running

Check the prefix\bin directory and type radare2

Debugging

If you experience any segfault you can start the VS debugger from cmd.exe using the following line:

devenv /DebugExe radare2.exe rax2.exe

After starting the process, vs will take the source information and display the stacktrace, variable values and so on, fix the code, run make.bat and try again until the bug is gone.

Crosscompilation

Run sys/mingw32.sh or sys/mingw64.sh to crosscompile r2 from Linux/macOS to 32 or 64bit Windows using acr/make.

Blob builds

The binr/blob directory contains the program that acts like busybox but for r2. Rename the executable to any of the collection and it will act accordingly.

This is, a single executable, with no external libraries that you can drop anywhere easily, 3rd party plugins won't work well with it, but it's useful to have in a variety of situations.

Compiling the blob for windows

Follow the native build instructions and just pass an argument to the second step:

configure.bat static
make.bat

Continuous Integration

You can also check the CI scripts under .github/workflow to see the steps performed to generate the release builds for Windows.

Most notabily there are some 3rd party bugs that we cannot handle and they are workarounded in the environment setup.

Troubleshooting

meson have race condition bugs that force you to compile with ninja -j1
Some recent versions of pip generate bogus wrapper programs for meson
Visual Studio 2022 may not be supported out of the box yet
Python PATH can break over shells, better use pyenv as preconfigure.bat does

2.5 KiB Raw Permalink Blame History