Building Bitcoin Core with Visual Studio ======================================== Introduction --------------------- Solution and project files to build the Bitcoin Core applications (except Qt dependent ones) with Visual Studio 2017 can be found in the build_msvc directory. Building with Visual Studio is an alternative to the Linux based [cross-compiler build](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/build-windows.md). Dependencies --------------------- A number of [open source libraries](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/dependencies.md) are required in order to be able to build Bitcoin. Options for installing the dependencies in a Visual Studio compatible manner are: - Use Microsoft's [vcpkg](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/vcpkg) to download the source packages and build locally. This is the recommended approach. - Download the source code, build each dependency, add the required include paths, link libraries and binary tools to the Visual Studio project files. - Use [nuget](https://www.nuget.org/) packages with the understanding that any binary files have been compiled by an untrusted third party. The external dependencies required for the Visual Studio build are (see [dependencies.md](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/dependencies.md) for more info): - Berkeley DB - OpenSSL - Boost - libevent - ZeroMQ - RapidCheck Additional dependencies required from the [bitcoin-core](https://github.com/bitcoin-core) GitHub repository are: - libsecp256k1 - LevelDB Building --------------------- The instructions below use `vcpkg` to install the dependencies. - Clone `vcpkg` from the [github repository](https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg) and install as per the instructions in the main README.md. - Install the required packages (replace x64 with x86 as required): ``` PS >.\vcpkg install --triplet x64-windows-static boost-filesystem boost-signals2 boost-test libevent openssl zeromq berkeleydb secp256k1 leveldb rapidcheck ``` - Use Python to generate *.vcxproj from Makefile ``` PS >py -3 msvc-autogen.py ``` - Build in Visual Studio.