I need to install Primer3 for my research in Windows, and I really have no idea of how to go about it. I was following the instructions mentioned here.
I'm getting to the part where I need to run
mingw32-make TESTOPTS=--windows
and I keep getting an error saying:
'mingw32-make' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
Just for reference, I went into the minGW Installation manager and got the ming32-make packages, including the bin, doc, lang, and lic ones, because I really had no idea which one was the correct one.
If someone could help me, I would be very grateful! Installing these niche programs without an installation wizard is a challenge!
You will need to install mingw32-make. This is a
Windows of port of GNU Make,
a software-build tool that is supported on all operating systems,
indeed the daddy of such tools.
But make alone will not suffice. To build primer3 you will
need a Windows port of the whole GNU toolchain for building software
from source code. Without that, running make by itself will
just expose the absence of the GCC compiler and linker that it
expects to do its bidding.
This is quite a lot of software, but it is easy and quick to install and there
are several open-source offerings. I suggest you go to TDM GCC
and download the TDM64 bundle. This will give you an executable installer.
Just run it and you will end up with the complete GNU toolchain, including,
mingw32-make, in your chosen installation directory.
It will also install in your Windows launch menu the MinGW command prompt.
Launch this and you will be presented with a Windows commandline console
with its environment set up to find and run any of the GNU tools.
In this console change directory to your primer3-X.Y.Z/test directory
and then run mingw32-make TESTOPTS=--windows as per documentation.
Be forwarned that the self-tests of primer3 that are executed to
verify the build may take 1/2 hr. to 1 hr. to run, depending on your
hardware, but they will finish successfully with the steps I've
described, barring problems specific to your machine. It is a foolproof-simple build.
All the built executables are deposited in the primer3-X.Y.Z/src
directory. You may want to move them somewhere more convenient
in in your PATH.
It does seem oddly amateurish that the documentation simply
directs you to run mingw32-make with no preliminary account of
what that is or how to install it, while on the other hand it
advises that you must install perl and strongly recommends a
specific perl distribution; but evidently primer3 is open-source
scientfic software and its documentation is not bad by the standard
of that genre.
I'm following the instructions of someone whose repository I cloned to my machine. I want to use the make command as part of setting up the code environment, but I'm using Windows. I searched online, but I could only find a make.exe file, a make-4.1.tar.gz file (I don't know what to do with it next) and instructions for how to download MinGW (for GNU; but after installing it I didn't find any mention of "make").
How do I use make in Windows without a GNU compiler or related packages?
make is a GNU command so the only way you can get it on Windows is installing a Windows version like the one provided by GNUWin32. Anyway, there are several options for getting that:
The most simple choice is using Chocolatey. First you need to install this package manager. Once installed you simlpy need to install make (you may need to run it in an elevated/admin command prompt) :
choco install make
Other recommended option is installing a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL/WSL2), so you'll have a Linux distribution of your choice embedded in Windows 10 where you'll be able to install make, gccand all the tools you need to build C programs.
For older Windows versions (MS Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008 / 7 with msvcrt.dll) you can use GnuWin32.
An outdated alternative was MinGw, but the project seems to be abandoned so it's better to go for one of the previous choices.
GNU make is available on chocolatey.
Install chocolatey from here.
Then, choco install make.
Now you will be able to use Make on windows.
I've tried using it on MinGW, but it should work on CMD as well.
The accepted answer is a bad idea in general because the manually created make.exe will stick around and can potentially cause unexpected problems. It actually breaks RubyInstaller: https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller2/issues/105
An alternative is installing make via Chocolatey (as pointed out by #Vasantha Ganesh K)
Another alternative is installing MSYS2 from Chocolatey and using make from C:\tools\msys64\usr\bin. If make isn't installed automatically with MSYS2 you need to install it manually via pacman -S make (as pointed out by #Thad Guidry and #Luke).
If you're using Windows 10, it is built into the Linux subsystem feature. Just launch a Bash prompt (press the Windows key, then type bash and choose "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows"), cd to the directory you want to make and type make.
FWIW, the Windows drives are found in /mnt, e.g. C:\ drive is /mnt/c in Bash.
If Bash isn't available from your start menu, here are instructions for turning on that Windows feature (64-bit Windows only):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
Download make.exe from their official site GnuWin32
In the Download session, click
Complete package, except sources.
Follow the installation instructions.
Once finished, add the <installation directory>/bin/ to the PATH variable.
Now you will be able to use make in cmd.
Install Msys2 http://www.msys2.org
Follow installation instructions
Install make with $ pacman -S make gettext base-devel
Add C:\msys64\usr\bin\ to your path
On windows 10 or 11, you can run the command winget install GnuWin32.Make in the command line or powershell to quickly install it. Than you can use the command cmake.
There is no need to install choco anymore.
The chances are that besides GNU make, you'll also need many of the coreutils. Touch, rm, cp, sed, test, tee, echo and the like. The build system might require bash features, if for nothing else, it's popular to create temp file names from the process ID ($$$$). That won't work without bash. You can get everything with the popular POSIX emulators for Windows:
Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.org/) Probably the most popular one and the most compatible with POSIX. Has some difficulties with Windows paths and it's slow.
GNUWin (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/) It was good and fast but now abandoned. No bash provided, but it's possible to use it from other packages.
ezwinports (https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports) My current favorite. Fast and works well. There is no bash provided with it, that can be a problem for some build systems. It's possible to use make from ezwinports and bash from Cygwin or MSYS2 as a workaround.
MSYS 1.19 abandoned. Worked well but featured very old make (3.86 or so)
MSYS2 (https://www.msys2.org/) Works well, second fastest solution after ezwinports. Good quality, package manager (pacman), all tooling available. I'd recommend this one.
MinGW abandoned? There was usually MSYS 1.19 bundled with MinGW packages, that contained an old make.exe. Use mingw32-make.exe from the package, that's more up to date.
Note that you might not be able to select your environment. If the build system was created for Cygwin, it might not work in other environments without modifications (The make language is the same, but escaping, path conversion are working differently, $(realpath) fails on Windows paths, DOS bat files are started as shell scripts and many similar issues). If it's from Linux, you might need to use a real Linux or WSL.
If the compiler is running on Linux, there is no point in installing make for Windows, because you'll have to run both make and the compiler on Linux. In the same way, if the compiler is running on Windows, WSL won't help, because in that environment you can only execute Linux tools, not Windows executables. It's a bit tricky!
I could suggest a step by step approach.
Visit GNUwin
Download the Setup Program
Follow the instructions and install GNUWin. You should pay attention to the directory where your application is being installed. (You will need it later1)
Follow these instructions and add make to your environment variables. As I told you before, now it is time to know where your application was installed.
FYI: The default directory is C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\.
Now, update the PATH to include the bin directory of the newly installed program.
A typical example of what one might add to the path is: ...;C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin
Another alternative is if you already installed minGW and added the bin folder the to Path environment variable, you can use "mingw32-make" instead of "make".
You can also create a symlink from "make" to "mingw32-make", or copying and changing the name of the file. I would not recommend the options before, they will work until you do changes on the minGW.
I once had the same problem. But I am surprised not to find one particular solution here.
Installation from GnuWin32 or via winget are good and easy options. But I only found make 3.8.1 there. This version lacks the very important option -O, which handles the output correctly when compiling multithreaded.
choco appears to offer make 4.3, currently. So one could expect recent versions there.
But there is also the option of self compiling. And if you have to install make, which is used for compiling, this should be a valid option.
head to https://www.gnu.org/software/make/ and download a version of your liking
unpack the tar.gz files (use 7zip and unpack the file twice to retrieve the actual content)
navigate to the created directory
open command prompt in that directory
run build_w32.bat gcc This will start the compilation with the gcc compiler, which you would need to install in advance. When running build_w32.bat without any option they try to use the MSVC compiler. Sidenote: I found it surprising that gnu does not use gcc as default but MSVC :-)
ignore the warnings created during compilation. The result should still be fine
retrieve your fresh gnumake.exe from the directoy GccRel (when compiled with gcc)
put this file somewhere where you like and rename to make.exe
add the location to the system variable %PATH%
As others have noted: This manual installation might cause conflicts if you have various make versions installed by other programs as well.
You can also install scoop, then run:
scoop install make
One solution that may helpful if you want to use the command line emulator cmder. You can install the package installer chocately. First we install chocately in windows command prompt using the following line:
#"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
refreshenv
After chocolatey is installed the choco command can be used to install make. Once installed, you will need add an alias to /cmder/config/user_aliases.cmd. The following line should be added:
make="path_to_chocolatey\chocolatey\bin\make.exe" $*
Make will then operate in the cmder environment.
Install npm
install Node
Install Make
node install make up
node install make
If above commands displays any error then install Chocolatey(choco)
Open cmd and copy and paste the below command (command copied from chocolatey URL)
#"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command " [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
when installing MSysgit, also MSys (as the name suggests) is installed on my machine.
When I additionally install DevKit for Ruby, yet another copy of MSys is installed on my computer. When installing the Haskell Platform for Windows, again another copy of MSys is installed on my machine. Is there any way of installing MSys/mingw once and tell all other software to do a lookup in the Path?
The version of msys that is included in the Git for Windows package is modified and if you attempt to replace it with a stock msys package you will run into problems. I can't comment on the other packages but basically - it is not worth worrying about. Disk space is significantly cheaper than the time you spend trying to make a number of independent packages share a common msys platform.
However, there are in fact people working on trying to sort that out. msys now has a package management system and I know of at least one project attempting to get the Git for Windows build environment working withing that system mingwGitDevEnv.
I've read http://dinosaur.compilertools.net/bison/bison_5.html#SEC25. But following those instruction i can not compile my yacc file using bison
How do i compile my file in windows 7 ... ?
Please help me to do this.
There is a common reason why bison will not operate properly on Windows and is mentioned in the install instructions but often overlooked. It is important that the name of the location of the directory that bison (and flex) is installed in (the path) does not contain a space. in particular this means that it cannot be placed under C:\Program Files\. The problem is that this directory might be suggest as the default install location. It is sometimes necessary to manually change the default to somethings else (like C:\GnuWin\ or similar). It is also usually necessary to manually add the appropriate directory to the PATH environment variable. Once this has been done there should be no problems in running bison and flex from the command prompt. It would normally be used in the following way:
flex lang.l
bison lang.y
gcc -o lang.exe lang.tab.c -lfl
It is not necessary to install MinGW, Cygwin or use Powershell or a VM or use linux as indicated by #DavidHefferman
If you still can't get it right, I even have an instructional video!
Using those Unix commands in Windows PowerShell might work, but I'm not sure and I'm currently not on Windows, so I can't check it.
If that fails you could try installing Cygwin (a basic Linux environment in Windows). You'd have to select the bison package during installation. It comes with its own shell that you can use.
Actually my personal favorite when programming under Windows is setting up a virtual machine with VirtualBox. That way you could use a real Linux environment without actually leaving Windows.
Good luck!
I've installed cygwin environment on Windows.
There is gcc 4.3. How to install gcc 4.4 in this environment?
The alternative is to build one yourself, but it will be extremely slow on cygwin. If you are a Linux user, you can build a native compiler (which runs in cmd.exe on windows, and produces native win32 binaries) on Linux. It is much faster (order of magnitude faster in my experience).
Otherwise, mingw is a good solution, although in my experience, the binary from equation.com work better for gcc 4.4 (there is no official gcc 4.4 from MinGW yet)
If you don't need the cygwin environment for special reasons, I'd go for Mingw with the gcc 4.4. You can find builds on: http://www.tdragon.net/recentgcc/.
Reading the MinGW FAQ, reveals that its possible to pass requests to use the MinGW binaries instead of the ones shipped with Cygwin.
For those who would like to use the Cygwin environment for development, yet generate non-Cygwin-dependant executables, a much easier option to "-mno-cygwin" does exist. Simply install Cygwin and the MinGW distribution in separate directories (i.e. "C:\CYGWIN" and "C:\MINGW"), and make sure that the "/bin" subdirectory beneath your MinGW installation comes before Cygwin's "/bin" subdirectory in your PATH environment variable (i.e. "PATH=%PATH%;C:\MINGW\BIN;C:\CYGWIN\BIN"). This will allow you access to all the UNIX tools you want, while ensuring that the instance of GCC used is the MinGW version. %%%
Bear in mind that within the "/etc/profile" file, Cygwin by default places "/usr/local/bin", "/usr/bin", and "/bin" ahead of your system-level PATH. Therefore, it is not enough to have the MinGW's "/bin" ahead of Cygwin in your Windows path... it must also be set to come first within the Cygwin environment (either by modifying "/etc/profile" or setting it manually).