how do I compile cURL with openSSL and nghttp2 on Windows x64? - windows

Question

first question ever on here, so bear with me :) I've been on the web for the past 3 days trying to find a way to get the following result on my windows machine.
example of 'cURL -V' output I need
I've found a lot of stuff for macOS and unix, but only bits and pieces for Windows. I'm running xampp, and ultimately I'm trying to get it to send http/2 requests through cURL/PHP. What I've gathered so far is that I need cURL to be compiled with some libraries, like openssl (at least 1.0.2), libcurl with http/2 enabled, and nghttp2. I feel like I'm very close but I'm just missing some steps.
What I've done so far:
installed things like mingw32, cmake, and Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017
downloaded nghttp2-1.27.0, and used 'cmake' and 'cmake --build' to get the 5 files: nghttp2.dll, .exp, .lik, .lib, and .pdb
downloaded curl-7.56.1.tar.gz (the very first one on https://curl.haxx.se/download.html)
downloaded libssh2-1.8.0
downloaded openssl-1.0.2l
downloaded zlib-1.2.11
followed instructions for Mingw32 on https://curl.haxx.se/docs/install.html (but it keeps giving me the error 'cannot find openSSL package')
I read somewhere that I need to compile cURL with the '--with-nghttp2 --prefix-[LOCATION OF NGHTTP2 FOLDER HERE]' flag, so I tried something that I thought would work, but I don't think it did: 'cmake --with-nghttp2 --prefix-[LOCATION OF NGHTTP2 FOLDER HERE] . ', then 'cmake install . ' and it looked like it did something, but the cURL.exe that was built inside curl-7.56.1/src/ did not have anything else but libcurl.
Any suggestions or pointers will be greatly appreciated! Thank you guys :)

Answer 1

Ok, I was finally able to build Curl on Windows with http/2 support.
This is what worked for me, step by step:
Downloaded "Build Tools for Visual Studio 2017" to be able to build from the command line (provides nmake and required Windows SDK libraries and header filtes)
downloaded the latest version of curl, like stated above (curl-7.56.1.tar.gz, aka for me the very first one on https://curl.haxx.se/download.html)
extracted it inside c:/curl, so I ended up with c:/curl/curl-7.56.1
read instructions BUILD.WINDOWS.txt inside c:/curl/curl-7.56.1/winbuild and proceeded to http://windows.php.net/downloads/php-sdk/deps/ to download the 4 libraries that I needed. I just grabbed the VC15/x86 versions.
created a new folder named "deps" inside c:/curl/curl-7.56.1
created the following 3 folders inside c:/curl/curl-7.56.1/deps: bin, lib, and include
extracted each library I just downloaded in the corresponding 3 folders
opened Developer Command Prompt for VS 2017
cd c:/curl/curl-7.56.1/winbuild
nmake -f Makefile.vc mode=dll WITH_DEVEL=c:/curl/curl-7.56.1/deps WITH_SSL=dll WITH_NGHTTP2=dll WITH_ZLIB=static WITH_SSH2=dll
this builds a CURL executable inside one of the subfolders in c:\curl\curl-7.56.1\builds
when I first tried running CURL, it showed an error saying missing libssl-1_1.dll and libcrypto-1_1.dll, so I had to copy them from c:\curl\curl-7.56.1\deps\bin to the same directory where the newly built curl.exe is
Note: since zlib didn't come with a bin folder containing any .dll's, I understand why I had to mark zlib as static with the WITH_ZLIB=static flag. What I don't get is why I had to manually move the openssl .dll's in the new directory. Any thoughts?
PS: thank you Daniel for pointing me in the right direction. I didn't even notice the /winbuild directory.
PPS: As you can probably tell, I had no idea what I've been doing 90% of the time. Probably why it took me 5 days to figure it out ;)