Build the Viewer on Windows

This "Minimum Requirements recipe" listed below works for both local machines and VMs such as VMWare Fusion.

This document is mostly complete and has been tested a number of times on bare metal systems. It is expected (and hoped) that developers will improve and refine this process over time - there are still some rough edges and things will change as new versions of software become available.

Some Gotchas before we start The external package versions and bit-widths listed below have been carefully selected and tested. If you decide to install a different version of a given package (even a minor update), you are on your own. This recipe, by design, only covers development using the Cygwin shell - some commands will have to be modified if you want to use the Windows Command Prompt instead. You will need at the very least, these items before you begin: A licensed installation of Windows 10 Visual Studio 2017

Windows

• Install 64-bit Windows 10 using your own product key

• Keep running Windows Update (Start Menu -> All Programs -> Windows Update) until clicking on "Check for Updates" there tells you everything is up to date. Depending on the age of the install media you started with, this could take a really long time and many, many iterations.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2017

• Install Visual Studio 2017
  • Run the installer as Administrator (right click, "Run as administrator")
  • Uncheck all the "Optional features to install:" - they are not required

CMake

• Download and install at least CMake 3.8.0
  • Run the installer as Administrator (right click, "Run as administrator")
  • At the "Install options" screen, select "Add CMake to the system PATH for all users"
  • For everything else, use the default options (path, etc.)

Cygwin

• Download and install Cygwin 64
  • Run the installer as Administrator (right click, "Run as administrator")
  • Use default options (path, components etc.) *until* you get to the "Select Packages" screen
  • Add additional packages:
    • Devel/patch
  • Use default options for everything else

Python

• Download and install the most recent version of Python 2.7 (32bit)
  • It is important to use 32-bit Python. The VMP requires it.
  • Note: No option available to install as Administrator
  • Use default options (path, components etc.) *until* you get to the "Customize Python" screen
  • Change "Add python.exe to Path" to "Will be installed on local hard drive"

Intermediate check

Confirm things are installed properly so far Open a Cygwin terminal and type: cmake --version hg --version python --version If they all report sensible values and not "Command not found" errors, then you are in good shape

Set up Autobuild

• Install Autobuild
  • Open a Windows command prompt: cygwin, cmd or powershell
  • pip install "git+https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/autobuild.git@v1.1.9""
• Check
  • autobuild --version
  • should report version 1.1.9

NSIS (Unicode)

• You must install the Unicode version here and not the one from the NSIS page
• Not required unless you need to build an actual viewer installer for distribution, or change the NSIS installer package logic itself

Test build of the Second Life Viewer

Open a Cygwin shell and create a folder to hold your work

cd /cygdrive/c
mkdir work
cd work

Check out the current viewer sources

git clone https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/viewer.git

Get viewer-build-variables; see Building the Viewer with Autobuild#Select Build Variables.

Switch to the directory you just checked out and run Autobuild Configure

cd viewer
autobuild configure -c configuration -A 64

where configuration is either "RelWithDebInfoOS" or "ReleaseOS". You can omit that option if you set the AUTOBUILD_CONFIGURATION environment variable to the one you want. -A may be either 64 or 32, depending on which you intend to build. You can omit that option if you set the AUTOBUILD_ADDRSIZE environment variable accordingly.

Please be patient: the autobuild configure command silently fetches and installs required autobuild packages, and some of them are large.

When that completes, you can either build within Visual Studio or from the command line

autobuild configure options

For help on configure options, type:

autobuild configure --help

The BUILD_ID is only important for a viewer you intend to distribute. For a local test build, it doesn't matter: it only needs to be distinct. If you omit --id (as is typical), autobuild will invent a BUILD_ID for you.

For the Linden viewer build, this usage:

autobuild configure [autobuild options]... -- [other options]...

passes [other options] to CMake. This can be used to override different CMake variables, e.g.:

autobuild configure [autobuild options]... -- -DSOME_VARIABLE:BOOL=TRUE

The set of applicable CMake variables is still evolving. Please consult the CMake source files in indra/cmake, as well as the individual CMakeLists.txt files in the indra directory tree, to learn their effects.

Command Line Builds

In bash, initialize your tools environment by running:

eval $(autobuild source_environment)

That only needs to be done once per bash session.

Build by running:

autobuild build --no-configure  -c configuration -A 64

the resulting viewer executable will be at:

build-vc150-64/newview/configuration/secondlife-bin.exe

Building within Visual Studio

Open the VS 2017 solution file

cygstart build-vc150-64/SecondLife.sln

• Select Release or RelWithDebInfo from the pulldown. (Debug is unmaintained. It would probably fail with perplexing errors.)
• Select your starting project, if desired
• Right-click on "secondlife-bin" in the Solution Explorer and select "Build"

wait...

When the build completes (hopefully without errors) run it by pressing Control-F5

Debugging from Visual Studio If you wish to debug from VS you will need to run the initial autobuild configure step with the CMake option -DUNATTENDED:BOOL=FALSE

Additional Tools & Settings you might need

• Tools
  • Install a Visual Studio helper like WholeTomato Visual Assist for VS2017 or Workspace Whiz
  • Install a decent merge tool such as Araxis, Beyond Compare, VSCode
  • Install PyInstaller developer version using pip.

    This is only required to create local Windows builds of modifications to the Viewer Management Process startup shim.

pip install https://github.com/pyinstaller/pyinstaller/tarball/develop