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Building the Latest Sonic Pi on Windows

Hello there lovely Windows user - welcome to our build instructions.

Installing vs Building

These instructions are for people wanting to build/compile their own version of Sonic Pi. If you're just looking to install it, we've already done all of this work for you and you can grab an installer for the latest release here:

https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/releases

If you're definitely sure you want to build your own release, then we really hope that these instructions help. Please let us know if you have any issues following them so we may continuously improve things.

https://in-thread.sonic-pi.net

OK, so just to get you prepared, we're going to do a few things:

  1. Install the various dependencies that Sonic Pi needs both to be built and to run
  2. Prepare the build by running some command scripts
  3. Build Sonic Pi using cmake
  4. Start your new Sonic Pi using your newly built .exe file.

Notes

The current build on Windows is assumed to be a 64 bit build done with Visual Studio 2019 (Community edition is fine).

If you're attempting to build 32 bit binaries, there are equivalent 32-bit build scripts, but these are currently largely untested. Do reach out if you're trying to do this and need some help in the forums.

1. Installing Dependencies

In order to build Sonic Pi's various components, we need to install a few dependencies:

  1. Visual Studio 2019
  2. Qt (5.15+)
  3. CMake (3.18+)
  4. Ruby (2.7.1+)

Let's look at each in turn.

1.1 Install - Visual Studio 2019

If you don't already have VS installed, head over to the downloads page and grab a copy of the free Community edition:

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads/

1.2 Install - Qt

Install the latest version of Qt (currently tested on 5.15.0) - ensure you pick 64 bit options for msvc:

http://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/5.15/5.15.0/single/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0.zip

You now need to setup the environment variable QT_INSTALL_LOCATION to point to Qt's new install location.

A simple way of doing this is to use the Rapid Environment Editor to set up these variables permanently (https://www.rapidee.com/en/about).

Alternatively, the setx command can make global variables. (Note that after using setx the command line needs to be restarted for it to take effect).

For example, if you installed Qt to C:\Qt\Qt5.15.0 then you could run:

setx QT_INSTALL_LOCATION C:\Qt\Qt5.15.0\5.15.0\msvc2017_64

(followed by restarting your command prompt)

1.3 Install - CMake

We use a build system called CMake to automatically build both Sonic Pi's GUI and many of its dependencies.

Install the latest CMake from here: http://www.cmake.org/download

1.4 Install - Ruby

Ruby is needed both for a number of the build steps and as the main runtime for the language server. We need to install both it and some additional libraries.

Firstly, install the latest version of Ruby (2.7.1 - 64 bit with devkit) from:

https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller2/releases/download/RubyInstaller-2.7.1-1/rubyinstaller-devkit-2.7.1-1-x64.exe

Once you have installed Ruby, you need to grab some additional libraries. We can do this from the command prompt with the following:

gem install win32-process
gem install rugged --version 0.27.1
gem install ffi

This uses the Ruby library management tool gem to install 3 dependencies for us - win32-process used to help manage Windows OS processes, rugged which is used to store the code diffs in a local Git repo and ffi which is used to hook into external shared libs such as libaubio.

Note that for Ruby to work correctly with systems that have their locale set to Arabic, you need to modify the registry.rb in your Ruby install to force the locale to UTF-8. For more information see:

sonic-pi-net#2416

2. Preparing the Build

Once we have installed all the dependencies, we're now ready to build Sonic Pi. We need to:

  1. Get a copy of Sonic Pi's source code
  2. Link the version of Ruby you installed into the source code.

2.1 Fetch Source

Before we can build Sonic Pi we must first get a copy of the source code. The easiest way of getting this is likely to be cloning from GitHub into a folder on your hard drive such as C:\dev\sonic-pi:

git clone https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi.git C:\dev\sonic-pi

If you don't have Git installed you should be able to download a .zip file of the latest commit or specific release you'd like to build:

https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/archive/main.zip

From now on these instructions will assume you downloaded the source into C:\dev\sonic-pi. If you used a different location be sure to change any future references to C:\dev\sonic-pi to your chosen location.

2.2 Link Ruby

Next, we need to point your build of Sonic Pi to your local Ruby installation. We can do this by creating a folder link - similar to a symbolic link on Linux and macOS. First, find out where you installed Ruby. For example, this might be C:\Ruby27-x64.

Finally, open a console as administrator (this is necessary for making the link). Then cd into the sonic-pi\app\server\native directory within your copy of Sonic Pi's source. For example, if you put Sonic Pi within C:\dev and installed Ruby to C:\Ruby27-x64 then you'd do the following:

cd C:\dev\sonic-pi\app\server\native
mklink /d ruby C:\Ruby27-x64

3. Running the Build

Nowe we're ready to build everything. This is achieved with 3 commands which will:

  1. Run the prebuild script which builds and sets up a lot of the dependencies.
  2. Run the config script to set up the build system.
  3. Run cmake to build the final entry-point binary.

3.1 Prebuild

Firstly, we need to change to the Qt directory which is within app\gui:

cd C:\dev\sonic-pi\app\gui\qt

3.2 Config

Next we run the prebuild and config scripts:

win-prebuild.bat
win-config.bat

3.3 Build

Once these have completed (it might take a while the first time you run a build) you'll find that you now have a build directory that's waiting for you to run your first build:

cd build
cmake --build . --config Release

(If you're already familiar with Visual Studio you should be able to take the existing solution file from within the build directory and build things with that).

4. Start Sonic Pi

Finally, you can run your newly compiled Sonic Pi from the build directory:

Release\sonic-pi.exe

Or from anywhere using the full path:

C:\dev\sonic-pi\app\gui\qt\build\Release\sonic-pi.exe

Good Luck!

Good luck and please share your new live coding adventure with us over on:

https://in-thread.sonic-pi.net

Tips

  • Error logs are written to %USERPROFILE%\.sonic-pi\logs, and are useful to diagnose any startup problems.
  • If a rebuild errors at the final stage of copying files, or you are otherwise having trouble starting Sonic Pi, there is win-killprocess.bat to remove Sonic Pi from memory. This will also kill SuperCollider if it has been left running.
  • 32bit and 64bit don't mix. Build the one you want in a clean tree. Make sure you also install all the right 32/64 bit components to match your build. 64bit is recommended on modern machines.
  • cd %QT_INSTALL_LOCATION% will take you to the directory you have set for that environment variable - a good way to check you have set it up correctly