Building Sequoia PGP on Windows
This is more for my own notes, but if you’re new to Windows development, it’s easy to get lost in the mix of MSVC and ‘mingw’. For the purposes of this post, the goal will be to build Sequoia PGP, a rust PGP implementation, in Windows using the ‘mingw’ environment (which uses the Nettles cryptography library vs Windows Cryptography).
Summary of the steps
- Install Rustup using the official package
- Install the windows-gnu toolchain and set it to default
- Install MSYS2
- Install the required packages from MSYS2 (clang, nettles, pkg-config)
- Update PATH
- Build using cargo
Installation steps
Install rustup
Use the official package at rustup.rs
Install the Windows GNU toolchain
You could have done this during the installation of rustup, but for clarity, if you went with the default settings, it could be installed separately:
rustup toolchain install stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
This default to this toolchain:
rustup default stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
Install MSYS2
Hop over to MSYS2.org and follow the instructions there.
Install the required packages from MSYS2
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-clang mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config mingw-w64-x86_64-nettle
Alternatively, install ‘pacboy’ which gets rid of the ‘mingw-w64-x86_64’ mess:
pacman -S pactools
pacboy -S clang pkg-config nettle
Make sure that you update the path (Assumes you’re in Powershell):
$env:Path += ';C:\msys64\mingw64\bin'
This is required because the build process will need to be able to find ‘cc.exe’ in the path.
Build Sequoia
Then run cargo build and that should be it.