How to port GTK applications for Windows

[RickBarretto]

Hello, everyone! I'm here again to show a bit more about owkettle working with Windows Operational System.

Well, basically after show how to compile for Windows and do some PR to make things easier, I tried to distribute my application.

In this case I tested it locally, masking my PATH variable. I tested it in three different ways.

How I tested it

Before continue and say How I did it, I'll explain how I tested what I'm saying.

Well, I tested it in three different ways, as I said before. Running from cmd, Msys2 and from explorer.
I wanted to make sure that my binary was getting the DLLs and configuration from local path, and not from System/Msys2's paths

Running from cmd

• I masked my Path with Path="" to don't get libraries from my /mingw64/bin path
• Then, in the local folder, I runned myapp.exe, well, it's working.

Running from Msys2

• I masked my PATH with PATH="", as I did for my cmd
• Then, in my local folder: ./myapp.exe, working well too

Running from explorer:

• I removed my Mingw and Msys2's variables from System's Variables manually
• Opened my folder with Windows' Explorer
• And then opened my application with a double-click as any other Windows' application, working well too

How I did it

First at all, thanks for @PhilippMDoerner for your help. He sent me this StackOverflow's thread that made me find a good article of how do this the right way by @mjakeman, so, please fork and star his awesome article 🙂, all credits to him!

But, in short (with some minor changes):

# ldd takes the necessary dlls and grep looks for `/mingw`'s libs...
$ ldd bin/myapp.exe | grep '\/mingw.*\.dll' -o | xargs -I{} cp "{}" ./bin

# Then copy some files
$ cp -r /mingw64/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0 ./bin/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0
$ cp -r /mingw64/share/icons/* ./bin/share/icons/
$ cp /mingw64/share/glib-2.0/schemas/* ./bin/share/glib-2.0/schemas/

# And compile local schemas
$ glib-compile-schemas.exe ./bin/share/glib-2.0/schemas/

Notes about the process

I made some minor changes about the original article, changing the directory structure. Note that I'm putting lib/ and share/ inside bin/ folder instead of the root folder. It's because I had some problems to run myapp.exe when I was at bin folder, it just worked to me when I was at the root folder (let's say, myapp/) and running with ./bin/myapp. When I tried to run my application with a double-click from Explorer, my application just printed a message that I used with Nim's echo and closed without any GUI, since it didn't find the other folders.

But, putting lib/ and share/ inside bin/, I can run it without any problems... 😉

The old structure:

root/
  bin/
    myapp.exe
    *.dll
  lib/
  share/

The new structure:

root/
  bin/
    myapp.exe
    *.dll
    lib/
    share/

Side note: root/ is actually optional and bin/ can be renamed as well. 😉

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I hope I have helped, any doubts, comments, issues, please let me know! 🙂

Also, you can see my modified article's fork

Related:

• Compiling `owlkettle` in Windows #53
• Fix gorge breaking builds #54
• Add Windows's GTK install instruction and the official documentation link  #55