Winbrew

A Homebrew-inspired package manager for Windows.

Why Winbrew?

Windows has a tricky ecosystem when it comes to building and packaging native (C/C++) software. Unlike Unix developers, who have mostly settled on Autotools (./configure, make install) Windows developers use many build systems: CMake, Boost jam, SCons, plain ol' msbuild, NMake, etc. This plethora of build systems makes finding/building dependencies for the latest Visual Studio runtime version a real pain.

Other Windows package managers distribute software that's packaged for msiexec (or similar). These package managers aren't designed for developers, and don't really follow the "Homebrew spirit":

• Don't duplicate what the system provides already
• Use the default system compilers
• Build from source
• Formulae are simple scripts

Winbrew provides all of the above for Windows development work.

Installing Winbrew

Download and install Microsoft Visual Studio 2019, then install Winbrew using pip:

pip install winbrew

To use files installed by Winbrew in your builds, set these environment variables:

set PATH=%PATH%;%LOCALAPPDATA%\WinBrew\lib;%LOCALAPPDATA%\WinBrew\bin
set LIB=%LIB%;%LOCALAPPDATA%\WinBrew\lib
set INCLUDE=%INCLUDE%;%LOCALAPPDATA%\WinBrew\include

Basic usage

Open the Visual Studio 2019 x64 Native Tools command prompt, then type:

winbrew install <package>

Winbrew installs all packages to %LOCALAPPDATA%\WinBrew by default, but you can change this by setting %WINBREW_HOME%. Also, note that WinBrew always builds 64-bit binaries.

Visual Studio version support

Winbrew supports 64-bit builds using the latest Visual Studio version, which is currently Visual Studio 2019.

Winbrew may work with 32-bit builds and older Visual Studio versions with minor tweaks to individual formulas. However, keep in mind that 32-bit builds and older Visual Studio versions aren't officially supported.

Want to contribute?

Winbrew needs authors to help write additional formulae! For more info, read CONTRIBUTING.md.