How to build a Windows installer under Linux or OSX
These are instructions for building a Windows installer (.exe) of your package under a foreign operating system. For this purposes, Wine is used to emulate Windows, although there is no reason why the extension cannot be built on a virtual machine.
- Install Wine (sudo apt-get install wine or available on OSX via macports).
- Install Python 2.7 from python.org.
- Install mingw. Click on the latest mingw-get-inst folder and download the exe file. Select the C, C++, and Fortran Compilers. You may get a log error when installing, but it should still work.
- Start the registry editor (wine regedit) and setup the system path:
- Browse to the PATH key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment, or use Edit > Find > PATH.
- Append to it: c:\python27;c:\mingw\bin;c:\python27\scripts.
- Right click and select New > String Value to create a new key called HOME and set it to c:\users\yourusername
- Create a new file in ~/.wine/dosdevices/c:/users/yourusername/ called pydistutils.cfg containing
[build] compiler=mingw32
This tells distutils not to look for the Microsoft Compilers, but to use mingw as the default compiler.
- Get the setuptools-*.win32-py2.7.exe from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools and install.
7. Install Cython (using wine easy_install cython). Note: If you get error: unrecognized command line option '-mno-cygwin', remove the -mno-cygwin flags in the Mingw32CCompiler class in ~/.wine/dosdevices/c:/Python27/Lib/distutils/cygwinccompiler.py, then run easy_install again. For more information, see python issue 12641. The diff is as follows:
322,326c322,326 < self.set_executables(compiler='gcc -O -Wall', < compiler_so='gcc -mdll -O -Wall', < compiler_cxx='g++ -O -Wall', < linker_exe='gcc', < linker_so='%s %s %s' --- > self.set_executables(compiler='gcc -mno-cygwin -O -Wall', > compiler_so='gcc -mno-cygwin -mdll -O -Wall', > compiler_cxx='g++ -mno-cygwin -O -Wall', > linker_exe='gcc -mno-cygwin', > linker_so='%s -mno-cygwin %s %s'
- Optionally, install Numpy from provided installer. Browse to the desired numpy-*-win32-superpack-python27.exe.
- Compile your extension from within your package source directory
python setup.py bdist_wininst
This will only work if you have a setup.py file, similar to the one at https://github.com/stefanv/cython_demo.git.
This step should then generate a .exe in the dist/ directory.
