Guidelines and HOWTOs/Build from source/Windows

Craft is a tool to build the sources and its third-party requirements. It is the easy way to build software.

Setting up craft

Setting up a compiler

Currently Craft supports both the MinGW and Microsoft Visual Studio (msvc) compiler. While MinGW is can be installed by Craft, Visual Studio must be installed independently by the user.

Direct X SDK

In order to compile the Qt5 qtbase package with MinGW you will also need to install the Microsoft DirectX SDK, make sure to open a new command line window after the installation.

Installing Craft

• Start a powershell environment as administrator.
• Allow execution of powershell scripts.

 Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

• Exit the administrator powershell instance.
• Start a powershell environment as a user.
• Install Craft and folow the instructions

iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/KDE/craft/master/setup/install_craft.ps1'))

Using Craft

To use Craft you need to start a Powershell window, point that to KDEROOT\craft and run the initalization script. For example:

C:\KDEROOT\craft\kdeenv.ps1

This tells Craft about your environment settings (e.g. paths). It will load your configuration from KDEROOT\etc\kdesettings.ini. If there are any error messages Craft will not work as expected. The output should look similar to this one (of course with your paths):

PS C:\kderoot\craft>.\kdeenv.ps1
KDEROOT     : C:\kderoot\
KDECOMPILER : msvc2015
KDESVNDIR   : C:\kderoot\download\svn
KDEGITDIR   : C:\kderoot\download\git
DOWNLOADDIR : C:\kderoot\download
PYTHONPATH  : C:\kderoot\python

PS C:\kderoot\>

Common Craft commands

• Installing a package and its dependencies: Simply run

  craft packagename
  

• Updating an installed package: Once you have packagename built, type

  craft -i packagename
  

  to update packagename.

Troubleshooting

If a package fails to build, you'll be greeted with something like:

 ...
 craft warning: while running make cmd: jom
 craft warning: Action: compile for libs/qt5/qtbase FAILED
 *** Craft all failed: all of libs/qtbase failed after 0:07:25 ***
 craft error: fatal error: package libs/qtbase all failed

In order to figure out what failed, grep the command line output above for errors.

If the log output is too long, you can also pipe the output to a file and then open the file inside an editor.

 craft qt > log 2>&1
 notepad++ log

Grep for "error", or "error:" in the file.