This section contains information about building Tribler on Windows. In the end you should be left with a .exe file which, when opened, enables users to install Tribler on their system. This guide installs a 64-bit version of Tribler and has been tested on Windows 10 and Windows 2008 Server R2, 64-bit. It is recommended to create this builder on a system that is already able to run Tribler from a git checkout (it means that all the required packages required by Tribler are installed already). In case you want to build a 32 bit version, just install all the dependencies mentioned in 32 bit version. Information about setting up a developer environment on Windows can be found here.

When you have installed zope, an empty __init__.py file must be present in the zope folder. If this file is missing, a No module named zope error will be thrown. Create this file in the site-packages/zope folder if it does not exist.

Required packages

To build a Tribler installer, you’ll need some additional scripts and packages. The versions used as of writing this guide are mentioned next to the package or script. * The git command tools (version 2.7.0) are required to fetch the latest release information. These can be downloaded from here. * PyInstaller, a tool to create an executable from python files. Install the latest version from pip: pip install pyinstaller. * The builder needs to find all packages that are required by Tribler so make sure you can run Tribler on your machine and that there are no missing dependencies. * Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) (version 2.5.0) is a script-driven Installer authoring tool for Microsoft Windows with minimal overhead. It can be downloaded here. We selected version 2.5 as the uninstall functions were not called properly in 3.03b. * Three plugins are required.The UAC plugin is the first. This can be downloaded from here (version 0.2.4c). How to install a plugin can be found here. * The second plugin that is needed is AccessControl plug-in (version 1.0.8.1). It can be downloaded here. * The third plugin required is NSIS Simple Firewall Plugin (version 1.2.0). You can download it here. * The fourth plugin needed is NSProcess (Version 1.6.7), which can be downloaded here. * A version of Microsoft Visual Studio should be installed (we use 2012), but make sure you do not have the build-tools only. The full (community) edition can be downloaded here.

Building & Packaging Tribler

Start by cloning Tribler if you haven’t done already (using the git clone command). Next, create a build folder directly on your C:\ drive. Inside the build folder, put the following items:

  1. A folder certs containing a .pfx key. In our case it’s named swarmplayerprivatekey.pfx. Make sure to rename paths in makedist_win.bat to match your file name.

  2. vc_redist_110.exe (Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012), which is available here. In case you build 32 bit, get the x86 version. Once more, don’t forget to rename the file.

  3. libsodium.dll which can be downloaded from libsodium.org (as of writing version 1.0.8).

  4. The openssl dll files libeay32.dll, libssl32.dll and ssleay32.dll (place them in a directory named openssl).

Then:

  • Set a PASSWORD environment variable with its value set to the password matching the one set in your .pfx file.

  • Create the .TriblerVersion file with the result of execution of the following command: git describe | python -c "import sys; print(next(sys.stdin).lstrip('v'))"

  • Create the .TriblerCommit file with the result of execution of the following command: git rev-parse HEAD

  • Set the TRIBLER_VERSION environment variable with the content of the .TriblerVersion file.

  • Set the QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen environment variable

  • Set the QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1 environment variable

  • Set the QT_IM_MODULE=ibus environment variable

Finally, open a command prompt and enter the following commands (Change 11.0 depending on your version of Microsoft Visual Studio): Note that for building 32 bit you need to pass anything but 64, i.e. 32 or 86 to the update_version.py script.

This builds an .exe installer which installs Tribler.