[download] Where can I download an offline installer of Cygwin?

I need an offline installer with most of the utilities commonly needed. Somehow the default installer confuses me with all its package selection. I installed Cygwin but I can't find the diff utility after the installation.

I'm not a big fan of Cygwin. It is good if you have some Unix code that requires a full POSIX system, I suppose. Even then, using it renders your programs GPL (due to the GPLed DLL), unless you pay Red Hat for a different license.

Most people should be using MinGW (and MSYS) instead. This gives you the Unix shell and utilities (even compilers, if you want them) without the purposely infectious DLL. Most of the folks using GNU compilers on Windows are using MinGW (although some don't realise it).

Just as importantly for your purposes, you can download the parts separately, rather than use the re-downloading installer.

The SourceForge download page is here. I'd suggest starting with the MSYS Base System package, which will give you the coreutils, Bash, make, tar, etc. If there's other stuff you need, you can pick and choose from the list of packages.

There is another solution to creating an offline Cygwin installer, which is using 'pmcyg' (http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/pmcyg). If you give pmcyg a list of Cygwin packages you'd like to have available, it will automatically download all of them, their dependencies, and the setup.exe into a folder that you can then burn onto a cdrom.

Perhaps this description helps you in your task.

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2003-09/msg00041.html

Here are instructions assuming you want to install Cygwin on a computer with no Internet connection. I assume that you have access to another computer with an Internet connection. Start on the connected computer:

• Get the Cygwin install program ("setup.exe"). Direct download URL: x86 or x86_64.

• When the setup asks "Choose a download source", choose Download Without Installing

• Go through the rest of the setup (choose download directory, mirrors, software packages you want, etc)

• Now you have a Cygwin repository right there on your hard disk. Copy this directory, along with the "setup.exe" program, over to your target computer (it does not need to be on a network).

• On the target computer, run "setup.exe"

• When the setup asks "Choose a download source", choose Install From Local Directory

• Complete setup as usual. No Internet access is required.

Not a direct answer to your question, but you can get the most commonly used utilities from http://www.mingw.org/ without having to jump through the hoops with that horrible Cygwin installer.

Here is a slightly more informative link http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/cobcurses/index.php?title=Install-MSYS.

1. Pick a mirror server closest to you from http://cygwin.com/mirrors.html

   Choose any FTP or HTTP mirror.

2. Download the whole mirror maintaining exact file tree structure of the cygwin directory in the mirror.

   Edit: How to download the whole mirror?

   wget -m <ftp-mirror-url>
   

3. Execute setup.exe & choose source as local directory and browse to the release directory.

Now you have the Offline Cygwin Installer.

Update: Use Babun. It's based on cygwin and more user friendly. Get Babun

may this post can solve your problem

see Full Installation Answer on that: What is the current full install size of Cygwin?

You can download from below link. ftp://ftp.comtrol.com/dev_mstr/sdk/other/1800136.tar.gz After downloading just extract the image and install.

I maintained rsync copy of the repository in the past.

It wasn't that big. To reduce the sync size I used rsync option --exclude (like I don't need texlive or ruby and they are not essential for base system).

Check:

• https://cygwin.com/mirrors.html (most support HTTP/FTP but some include rsync)

Than you host this mirror via HTTP/FTP for local or organization installs:

setup.exe -p emacs --site http://localhost/cygwin

Install Babun instead -> https://babun.github.io/index.html It contains Cygwin ;)