Cherokee on Windows: improving the building environment

As it was anounced some time ago, Cherokee 0.8 will once again have a native Windows binary. We’ve been having a lot of requests because our Windows users haven’t had the chance to taste Cherokee-Admin since it was born.

Beware that the Windows build has to be taken with a grain of salt under Windows. A lot of work is still needed since some major changes -like a totally rewritten I/O cache, a lot more efficient and stable- will be coming by the time 0.8 is released.

These are the necessary steps to setup a suitable building environment.

Like Alvaro said in his blog, installing the whole bundle of needed tools is not trivial. In fact, there was a strange problem with the provided autotools (automake 1.8.2 and autoconf 2.59) of the previous environment that made us have to manually tweak things in order to successfuly finish the compilation of Cherokee. This has been tested on a Windows XP virtual machine.

This is what you need to install.

MinGW: minimalist GNU for Windows (GCC & binutils)

• Download MinGW release 5.1.4 at the time of this writing.
  
• Run it and select ‘Candidate’. Check base tools & g++
• Install in a directory with no spaces (the default directory C:\MinGW is fine).

MSYS: Minimal SYStem

• Download MSYS, tests were made with release 1.0.10
• Install it in the same directory as MinGW (remove “1.0″ from the install path).
• Answer y, y, c:/MinGW
• You should add something like this to your ~/.profile to process your preferences:

if [ -f ${HOME}/.bashrc ] then
  . ${HOME}/.bashrc
fi

MSYS DTK: Dev Toolkit

• Get DTK
• Install it in the same path as above

Update Autoconf & Automake

• Something strange happened as I said above, so I had to manually upgrade both to recent versions. I simply matched the ones I have in my Linux box and got it working. Afterwards I found packages with just that, so just install these autoconf and automake and you’re good to go.

Pthreads Win32: POSIX Threads

• Cherokee will need these. Just download ftp://sourceware.org/pub/pthreads-win32/dll-latest/ and copy the appropriate files to /lib and /include

Python

• You will need this, since both the build process and Cherokee-Admin use Python. Just download a Python Windows installer, remember to include the directory in your path environment variable, and you’re done
• rxvt seems to be broken, which is most noticeable when you try to run Python interactively, so I just comment out its line in msys.bat.

Nice to have:

If you want to do something more than just building the binaries, you should also consider installing the usual tools: SVN, Emacs, gdb… Remember including them in your path.

Configuring and building:

After setting your environment you’ll have to change slighlty the configure command because there is still a problem with readdir_r. Hopefully it will be solved shortly.

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var \
--enable-trace --enable-static-module=all --enable-static         \
--enable-shared=no --enable-beta --disable-readdir_r

And that should be it.

If you still have some kind of problem you could always try out this working bundle that I’ve just uploaded to cherokee-project.com and extract it in C:\, but I’m unsure if it would work before at least using the installers for MinGW and MSYS. I haven’t tried, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some DLLs were needed in specific places. After that, using my package should probably be OK. As I’ve said some times now, I don’t do Windows so I’m afraid I won’t be of much help here.

Have fun, and good luck. We’ll keep you informed.

UPDATE: If you’re still having trouble with this, Alvaro wrote an update to this that will hopefully be the last one we need.