How to use GNU Make on Windows

Question

I installed MinGW and MSYS  added C  MinGW bin to PATH but I still can t run Makefile on Windows  cmd  I would like to run cmd exe and there type  for example  make all but my cmd says that there is no such command    What should I do  I don t want to use MSYS shell  that s not the point  Any ideas how to use GNU Make in Windows cmd as I can do it in Ubuntu  I m not interested in Cygwin

User · Answer

I m using GNU Make from the GnuWin32 project  see http   gnuwin32 sourceforge net  but there haven t been any updates for a while now  so I m not sure on this project s status

User · Answer

Although this question is old  it is still asked by many who use MSYS2   I started to use it this year to replace CygWin  and I m getting pretty satisfied   To install make  open the MSYS2 shell and type the following commands     Update the package database and core system packages pacman -Syu   Close shell and open again if needed    Update again pacman -Su    Install make pacman -S make    Test it  show version  make -v

User · Answer

Here s how I got it to work     copy c  MinGW bin mingw32-make exe c  MinGW bin make exe   Then I am able to open a command prompt and type make     C  Users Dell gt make   make      No targets specified and no makefile found   Stop    Which means it s working now

User · Answer

You can add the application folder to your path from a command prompt using   setx PATH   PATH  c  MinGW bin   Note that you will probably need to open a new command window for the modified path setting to go into effect

User · Answer

While make itself is available as a standalone executable  gnuwin32 sourceforge net package make   using it in a proper development environment means using msys2   Git 2 24  Q4 2019  illustrates that   See commit 4668931  commit b35304b  commit ab7d854  commit be5d88e  commit 5d65ad1  commit 030a628  commit 61d1d92  commit e4347c9  commit ed712ef  commit 5b8f9e2  commit 41616ef  commit c097b95  04 Oct 2019   and commit dbcd970  30 Sep 2019  by Johannes Schindelin  dscho    Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 6d5291b  15 Oct 2019        test-tool run-command  learn to run  parts of  the testsuite      Signed-off-by  Johannes Schindelin      Git for Windows jumps through hoops to provide a development environment that allows to build Git and to run its test suite        To that end  an entire MSYS2 system  including GNU make and GCC is offered as  the Git for Windows SDK     It does come at a price  an initial download of said SDK weighs in with several hundreds of megabytes  and the unpacked SDK occupies  2GB of disk space       A much more native development environment on Windows is Visual Studio  To help contributors use that environment  we already have a Makefile target vcxproj that generates a commit with project files  and other generated files   and Git for Windows  vs master branch is continuously re-generated using that target       The idea is to allow building Git in Visual Studio  and to run individual tests using a Portable Git

User · Answer

As an alternative  if you just want to install make  you can use the chocolatey package manager to install gnu make by using  choco install make -y  This deals with any path issues that you might have

User · Answer

user1594322 gave a correct answer but when I tried it I ran into admin permission problems  I was able to copy  mingw32-make exe  and paste it  over-ruling by-passing admin issues and then editing the copy to  make exe   On VirtualBox in a Win7 guest

[windows] How to use GNU Make on Windows?

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