[[!meta title="cross-compiling tinc for Windows under Linux using MinGW"]]

## Howto: cross-compiling tinc for Windows under Linux using MinGW

This howto describes how to create a Windows binary of tinc. Although it is
possible to compile tinc under Windows itself, cross-compiling it under Linux
is much faster. It is also much easier to get all the dependencies in a modern
distribution. Therefore, this howto deals with cross-compiling tinc with MinGW
under Linux on a Debian distribution.

The result is a 32-bit executable. If you want to create a 64-bit executable,
have a look at the [[64-bit cross-compilation example|examples/cross-compiling-64-bit-windows-binary]].

### Overview

The idea is simple:

* Install MinGW and Wine.
* Create a directory where we will perform all cross-compilations.
* Get all the necessary sources.
* Cross-compile everything.

### Installing the prerequisites for cross-compilation

There are only a few packages that need to be installed as root to get started:

	sudo apt-get install mingw-w64 wine git-core quilt
	sudo apt-get build-dep tinc

Other Linux distributions may also have MinGW packages, use their respective
package management tools to install them.  Debian installs the cross-compiler
in `/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/`. Other distributions might install it in another
directory however, for example `/usr/i686-pc-mingw32/`. Check in which directory
it is installed, and replace all occurences of `i686-w64-mingw32` in this
example with the correct name from your distribution.

### Setting up the build directory and getting the sources

We will create a directory called `mingw/` in the home directory.  We use
apt-get to get the required libraries necessary for tinc, and use `git` to get
the latest development version of tinc.

	mkdir $HOME/mingw
	cd $HOME/mingw
	apt-get source openssl liblzo2-dev zlib1g-dev
	git clone https://tinc-vpn.org/git/tinc

### Making cross-compilation easy

To make cross-compiling easy, we create a script called `mingw` that will set
up the necessary environment variables so configure scripts and Makefiles will
use the MinGW version of GCC and binutils:

	mkdir $HOME/bin
	cat >$HOME/bin/mingw << 'EOF'
	#!/bin/sh
	PREFIX=i686-w64-mingw32
	export CC=$PREFIX-gcc
	export CXX=$PREFIX-g++
	export CPP=$PREFIX-cpp
	export RANLIB=$PREFIX-ranlib
	export PATH="/usr/$PREFIX/bin:$PATH"
	exec "$@"
	EOF
	chmod u+x $HOME/bin/mingw

If `$HOME/bin` is not already part of your `$PATH`, you need to add it:

	export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"

We use this script to call `./configure` and `make` with the right environment
variables, but only when the `./configure` script doesn't support cross-compilation itself.
You can also run the export commands from the `mingw` script by
hand instead of calling the mingw script for every `./configure` or `make`
command, or execute `$HOME/bin/mingw $SHELL` to get a shell with these
environment variables set, but in this howto we will call it explicitly every
time it is needed.

### Compiling LZO

Cross-compiling LZO is easy:

	cd $HOME/mingw/lzo2-2.08
	./configure --host=i686-w64-mingw32
	make
	DESTDIR=$HOME/mingw make install

### Compiling Zlib

Cross-compiling Zlib is also easy, but a plain `make` failed to compile the
tests, so we only build the static library here:

	cd $HOME/mingw/zlib-1.2.8.dfsg
	mingw ./configure
	mingw make libz.a
	DESTDIR=$HOME/mingw mingw make install

### Compiling LibreSSL

Tinc can use either OpenSSL or LibreSSL. The latter is recommended.

	cd $HOME/mingw/libressl-2.3.3
	CC=i686-w64-mingw32-gcc ./configure --host=i686-w64-mingw32
	make
	DESTDIR=$HOME/mingw make install

### Compiling tinc

Now that all the dependencies have been cross-compiled, we can cross-compile
tinc.  Since we use a clone of the git repository here, we need to run
`autoreconf` first. If you want to cross-compile tinc from a released tarball,
this is not necessary.

	cd $HOME/mingw/tinc
	autoreconf -fsi
	./configure --host=i686-w64-mingw32 --with-zlib=$HOME/mingw/usr/local
	make

### Testing tinc

Since Wine was installed, you can execute the resulting binary even on Linux.
Wine does not provide a TAP-Win32 device, but you can use the `DeviceType = dummy` option to test it without. 
The following command should work in any case:

	$HOME/mingw/tinc/src/tincd.exe --help