building the node on windows

Building the development version of the Cardano node on Windows

This document explains how to build a DEVELOPMENT version of the cardano-node. Note that this is not for building a PRODUCTION version of the node.

To start building on Windows, you will need to install and configure specific tools outlined below. We recommend using chocolatey, which provides the choco command to install these tools.

You can run all the instructions that invoke choco in PowerShell with root privileges. We recommend installing and using git-bash for development purposes, which is git when installed with choco install git.

Install GHC

The recommended way is to run the following command in PowerShell:

choco install --version 8.10.7 ghc

Install pkg-config

choco install pkgconfiglite

Install vcpkg

You will first need to install vcpkg to proceed with libsodium library installation (which is the next step).

For this, use git(which you can also install using choco) and follow these instructions.

You can now install libsodium with the following command:

./vcpkg install --triplet x64-windows libsodium

Create libsodium.pc file

To find system dependencies like libsodium, cabal uses pkg-config. On Windows, you will need to create the libsodium.pc description file in a correct directory.

In one of the paths reported by:

pkg-config --variable pc_path pkg-config

create libsodium.pc file, which contains:

libdir=VCPKG_PATH/installed/x64-windows/bin
includedir=VCPKG_PATH/installed/x64-windows/include

Name: libsodium
VERSION: LIBSODIUM_VERSION
Description: libsodium library
Cflags: -I${includedir}/sodium
Libs: -L${libdir} -llibsodium

Note that you need to replace VCPKG_PATH with the absolute path, where you use vcpkg, and LIBSODIUM_VERSION with the version number of libsodium which was installed on your system. Please verify that the paths above contain libsodium.dll file and headers.

Also, you cannot use prefix= in the libsodium.pc file. This might be changed for some other directory, pkg-config provides a switch to use the provided prefix, but there is no way to instruct cabal to do so.

cabal configuration

Go to the directory, where you cloned the cardano-node repository and add the command below to your cabal.project.local file (if you don't already have it, create one):

max-backjump: 5000
reorder-goals: True

package cardano-crypt-praos
  flags: -external-libsodium-vrf

extra-lib-dirs: "VCPKG_PATH\\installed\\x64-windows\\bin"
extra-include-dirs: "VCPKG_PATH\\installed\\x64-windows\\include"

The final step is to add VCPKG_PATH/installed/x64-windows/bin to the PATH variable. Since we are using git-bash, you can do this with:

export PATH="VCPKG_PATH/installed/x64-windows/bin:${PATH}"

Remember to substitute VCPKG_PATH with the real path.

You can now build the node with:

cabal build --builddir /c/dist exe:cardano-node

Note: using --builddir /c/dist with a succinct directory protects you from exceeding the maximal path size on Windows (which is a limitation of the linker rather than ghc itself).

You can now verify whether the node runs:

cabal run --builddir /c/dist exe:cardano-node -- run --help