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Building Bitcoin Core with Visual Studio

Introduction

Solution and project files to build the Bitcoin Core applications msbuild or Visual Studio can be found in the build_msvc directory. The build has been tested with Visual Studio 2017 and 2019.

Building with Visual Studio is an alternative to the Linux based cross-compiler build.

Quick Start

The minimal steps required to build Bitcoin Core with the msbuild toolchain are below. More detailed instructions are contained in the following sections.

cd build_msvc
py -3 msvc-autogen.py
msbuild /m bitcoin.sln /p:Platform=x64 /p:Configuration=Release /t:build

Dependencies

A number of open source libraries are required in order to be able to build Bitcoin Core.

Options for installing the dependencies in a Visual Studio compatible manner are:

Use Microsoft's 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 packages with the understanding that any binary files have been compiled by an untrusted third party.

The external dependencies required for building are listed in the build_msvc/vcpkg.json file. The msbuild project files are configured to automatically install the vcpkg dependencies.

Qt

In order to build the Bitcoin Core a static build of Qt is required. The runtime library version (e.g. v141, v142) and platform type (x86 or x64) must also match.

Some prebuilt x64 versions of Qt can be downloaded from here. Please be aware these downloads are NOT officially sanctioned by Bitcoin Core and are provided for developer convenience only. They should NOT be used for builds that will be used in a production environment or with real funds.

To determine which Qt prebuilt version to download open the .appveyor.yml file and note the QT_DOWNLOAD_URL. When extracting the zip file the destination path must be set to C:\. This is due to the way that Qt includes, libraries and tools use internal paths.

To build Bitcoin Core without Qt unload or disable the bitcoin-qt, libbitcoin_qt and test_bitcoin-qt projects.

Building

The instructions below use vcpkg to install the dependencies.

Install vcpkg.
Use Python to generate *.vcxproj from Makefile

PS >py -3 msvc-autogen.py

An optional step is to adjust the settings in the build_msvc directory and the common.init.vcxproj file. This project file contains settings that are common to all projects such as the runtime library version and target Windows SDK version. The Qt directories can also be set.
To build from the command line with the Visual Studio 2017 toolchain use:

msbuild /m bitcoin.sln /p:Platform=x64 /p:Configuration=Release /p:PlatformToolset=v141 /t:build

To build from the command line with the Visual Studio 2019 toolchain use:

msbuild /m bitcoin.sln /p:Platform=x64 /p:Configuration=Release /t:build

Alternatively open the build_msvc/bitcoin.sln file in Visual Studio.

AppVeyor

The .appveyor.yml in the root directory is suitable to perform builds on AppVeyor Continuous Integration servers. The simplest way to perform an AppVeyor build is to fork Bitcoin Core and then configure a new AppVeyor Project pointing to the forked repository.

For safety reasons the Bitcoin Core .appveyor.yml file has the artifact options disabled. The build will be performed but no executable files will be available. To enable artifacts on a forked repository uncomment the lines shown below:

    #- 7z a bitcoin-%APPVEYOR_BUILD_VERSION%.zip %APPVEYOR_BUILD_FOLDER%\build_msvc\%platform%\%configuration%\*.exe
    #- path: bitcoin-%APPVEYOR_BUILD_VERSION%.zip

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