A quick setup guide for Win32 and Win64 with recommended configuration.
Warning | |
---|---|
Unless you know exactly what you are doing, you should strictly follow the recommendations below. They are known to work and if the build breaks, please re-read this guide carefully. Known traps are:
|
PowerShell 2.0 or later is required for building Wireshark and the NSIS package. Windows 7 and later include compatible versions. It is also required by Chocolatey.
If you are running Windows Vista and have thus far managed to not install PowerShell 2.0, either directly or via anything that requires it, you must now install PowerShell 2.0. You can download it from https://www.microsoft.com/powershell
Chocolatey is a native package manager for Windows. There are packages for most of the software listed below. Along with traditional Windows packages it supports Cygwin and the Python Package Index.
You need to install, in exactly this order:
Uncheck all the optional components (unless you want to use them for purposes other than Wireshark).
You can use Chocolatey to install Visual Studio:
PS$>choco install VisualStudioCommunity2013
You can use other Microsoft C compiler variants, but VS2013 is used to build the development releases and is the preferred option. It’s possible to compile Wireshark with a wide range of Microsoft C compiler variants. For details see Section 4.6, “Microsoft compiler toolchain (Windows native)”.
You may have to do this as Administrator.
Compiling with gcc or Clang is not recommended and will certainly not work (at least not without a lot of advanced tweaking). For further details on this topic, see Section 4.5, “GNU compiler toolchain (UNIX only)”. This may change in future as releases of Visual Studio add more cross-platform support.
Why is this recommended? While this is a huge download, Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition is the only free (as in beer) versions that includes the Visual Studio integrated debugger. Visual Studio 2013 is also used to create official Wireshark builds, so it will likely have fewer development-related problems.
For VS2010 You will need some extra items:
Windows SDK for Windows 7, if you want to build 64-bit binaries for Windows 7: Download and install "Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7."
In case the install of the SDK fails go to software management and remove the VC++ 2010 runtime and redist packages (don’t worry, they will be added back via the service pack later). If installation of the SDK still fails, there may be a permission problem. See here for a solution.
The main Wireshark application uses the Qt windowing toolkit. To install Qt download the Online Installer from the Qt Project download page and select a component that matches your target system and compiler. For example, the “msvc2013 64-bit OpenGL” component is used to build the official 64-bit packages.
Note that separate installations (into different directories) of Qt are required for 32 bit and 64 bit builds. The environment variable QT5_BASE_DIR should be set as appropriate for your environment and should point to the Qt directory that contains the bin directory, e.g. C:\Qt\Qt5.5.0\5.5\msvc2013
On 32-bit Windows, download the 32-bit Cygwin installer and start it. On 64-bit Windows, download the 64-bit Cygwin installer and start it.
At the "Select Packages" page, you’ll need to select some additional packages which are not installed by default. Navigate to the required Category/Package row and, if the package has a "Skip" item in the "New" column, click on the "Skip" item so it shows a version number for:
You might also have to install
if installing Devel/bison doesn’t provide a working version of Bison. If m4 is missing bison will fail.
After clicking the Next button several times, the setup will then download and install the selected packages (this may take a while).
Why is this recommended? Cygwin’s bash version is required, as no native Win32 version is available. As additional packages can easily be added, Perl and other packages are also used.
Alternatively you can install Cygwin and its packages using Chocolatey:
PS$>choco install cygwin PS$>choco install cyg-get PS$>choco install sed asciidoc [...] -source cygwin
Chocolatey installs Cygwin in C:\tools\cygwin by default.
You can use Chocolatey’s Win flex-bison packages rather than the Cygwin Bison and Flex package:
PS$>choco install winflexbison
Get the Python 2.7 installer from http://python.org/download/ and install Python into the default location (C:\Python27).
Why is this recommended? Cygwin’s Python package doesn’t work on some machines, so the Win32 native package is recommended (and it’s faster). Note that Python 3.x isn’t currently supported.
Alternatively you can install Python using Chocolatey:
PS$>choco install python2
Chocolatey installs Python 2 in C:\tools\python2 by default.
Please note that the following is not required to build Wireshark but can be quite helpful when working with the sources.
Working with the Git source repositories is highly recommended, see Section 3.3, “Obtain the Wireshark sources”. It is much easier to update a personal source tree (local repository) with Git rather than downloading a zip file and merging new sources into a personal source tree by hand. It also makes first-time setup easy and enables the Wireshark build process to determine your current source code revision.
There are several ways in which Git can be installed. Most packages are available at the URLs below or via Chocolatey. Note that many of the GUI interfaces depend on the command line version.
The official command-line installer is available at http://msysgit.github.io/.
Git Extensions is a native Windows graphical Git client for Windows. You can download the installer from http://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/.
TortoiseGit is a native Windows graphical Git similar to TortoiseSVN. You can download the installer from http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/.
The command line client can be installed (and updated) using Chocolatey:
PS$> choco install git
A list of other GUI interfaces for Git can be found at http://git-scm.com/downloads/guis