This section contains information about setting up a Tribler development environment on Windows. Unlike Linux based systems where installing third-party libraries is often a single apt-get command, installing and configuring the necessary libraries requires more attention on Windows. Moreover, the Windows environment has different file structures. For instance, where Linux is working extensively with .so (shared object) files, Windows uses DLL files.

Introduction

In this guide, all required dependencies of Tribler will be explained. It presents how to install these dependencies. Some dependencies have to be built from source whereas other dependencies can be installed using a .msi or .exe installer. The guide targets Windows 7 or higher, 64-bit systems, however, it is probably not very hard to install 32-bit packages.

First, Python 3 should be installed. If you already have a Python version installed, please check whether this version is 64 bit before proceeding.

python -c "import struct;print( 8 * struct.calcsize('P'))"

This outputs whether your current installation is 32 or 64 bit.

Python can be downloaded from the official Python website. You should download the Windows x86-64 MSI Installer which is an executable. During the setup, remember to add Python to the PATH variable to access Python from the command line. The option to add Python to the PATH variable is unchecked by default! You can verify whether Python is installed correctly by typing python in the command line. If they are not working, verify whether the PATH variables are correctly set. Instructions on how to set path variable can be found here.

In order to compile some of the dependencies of Tribler, you will need the Visual Studio installed which can be downloaded from here or here. You should select the community edition. Visual Studio ships with a command line interface and all required tools that are used for building some of the Python packages. After the installation of Visual Studio, you should install the Visual C++ tools. This can be done from within Visual Studio by creating a new Visual C++ project. Visual Studio then gives an option to install the Visual C++ developer tools.

In case importing one of the modules fail due to a DLL error, you can inspect if there are files missing by opening it with Dependency Walker. It should show missing dependencies.

libtorrent

First, install Boost which can be downloaded from SourceForge. Make sure to select the latest version and choose the version is compatible with your version of Visual C++ tools (probably msvc-14).

After installation, you should set an environment variable to let libtorrent know where Boost can be found. You can do this by going to Control Panel > System > Advanced > Environment Variables (more information about setting environment variables can be found here). Now add a variable named BOOST_ROOT and with the value of your Boost location. The default installation location for the Boost libraries is C:\\local\\boost_<BOOST VERSION> where <BOOST VERSION> indicates the installed Boost version.

Next, you should build Boost.build. You can do this by opening the Visual Studio command prompt and navigating to your Boost libraries. Navigate to tools\\build and execute bootstrap.bat. This will create the b2.exe file. In order to invoke b2 from anywhere in your command line, you should add the Boost directory to your user PATH environment variable. After modifying your PATH, you should reopen your command prompt.

Now, download the libtorrent source code from GitHub and extract it. It is advised to compile version 1.0.8. Note that you if you have a 32-bit system, you can download the .msi installer so you do not have to compile libtorrent yourself. Open the Developer Command Prompt shipped with Visual Studio (not the regular command prompt) and navigate to the location where you extracted the libtorrent source. In the directory where the libtorrent source code is located, navigate to bindings\\python and build libtorrent by executing the following command (this takes a while so make sure to grab a coffee while waiting):

b2 boost=source libtorrent-link=static address-model=64

This command will build a static libtorrent 64-bit debug binary. You can also build a release binary by appending release to the command given above. After the build has been completed, the resulting libtorrent.pyd can be found in LIBTORRENT_SOURCE\\bindings\\python\\bin\\msvc-14\\debug\\address-model-64\\boost-source\\link-static\\ where LIBTORRENT_SOURCE indicates the directory with the libtorrent source files. Copy libtorrent.pyd to your site-packages location (the default location is C:\\Python37\\Lib\\site-packages)

After successfully copying the libtorrent.pyd file either compiled or from the repository, you can check if the installation was successful:

python -c "import libtorrent" # this should work without any error

libsodium

Libsodium is required for the libnacl library, used for cryptographic operations. Libsodium can be download as precompiled binary from their website. Download the latest version, built with msvc. Extract the archive to any location on your machine. Next, you should add the location of the dynamic library to your PATH variables (either as system variable or as user variable). These library files can be found in LIBSODIUM_ROOT\\x64\\Release\\v142\\dynamic\\ where LIBSODIUM_ROOT is the location of your extracted libsodium files. After modifying your PATH, you should reopen your command prompt. You test whether Python is able to load libsodium.dll by executing:

python -c "import ctypes; ctypes.cdll.LoadLibrary('libsodium')"

Note that this might fail on Python 3.8, since directories have to be explicitly whitelisted to load DLLs from them. You can either copy the libsodium.dll to your System32 directory or by whitelisting that directory using os.add_dll_directory when running Tribler.

Additional Packages

There are some additional packages which should be installed. They can easily be installed using pip:

pip install aiohttp aiohttp_apispec cffi chardet configobj cryptography decorator gmpy2 idna libnacl lz4 \
netifaces networkx numpy pillow psutil pyasn1 PyQt5 pyqtgraph pywin32 pyyaml

To enable Bitcoin wallet management (optional), you should install the bitcoinlib library (support for this wallet is highly experimental):

pip install bitcoinlib==0.4.10

Running Tribler

You should now be able to run Tribler from command line. Grab a copy of the Tribler source code and navigate in a command line interface to the source code directory. Start Tribler by executing the Batch script in the tribler/src directory:

tribler.bat

If there are any problems with the guide above, please feel free to fix any errors or create an issue so we can look into it.