Building on Windows

Prerequisites first: Build prerequisites (OpenSSL layout, CMake, translations). OpenSSL should be built/installed first; using a folder at the same level as the lmc folder as the OpenSSL folder is recommended (see the OpenSSL setup).

It is possible to compile using other build chains/IDEs, but the CI build uses CMake with the MSVC tool chain.

Build

The build is driven by CMake; the binaries are written to the build directory. The package-local target stages the complete runtime bundle into the LMC_RELEASE_DIR directory (defaults to <build-dir>/release). The CI build stages it into lmc\release where the packaging scripts expect it. Run from Git Bash (comes with Git for Windows):

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DLMC_RELEASE_DIR="$PWD/lmc/release"
cmake --build build --config Release --target package-local --parallel

The application binary is lmc.exe, with the lmcapp sources linked into it (no separate DLL), so no renaming step is needed. The package-local target copies the OpenSSL runtime DLLs (libcrypto*.dll, libssl*.dll) from openssl\bin into the output folder.

Qt deployment

To gather the Qt libraries and plugins into the output folder, run windeployqt --release <output>\lmc.exe afterwards, as done in the CI build. The Qt 6 TLS backend plugins (the tls folder) are needed for SSL support; copy them from your Qt installation’s plugins\tls folder into the output tls folder if windeployqt skipped them (the CI build does this as a separate step).

Installer

To build the installer, run setup.bat in the lmc\setup\win32 folder. NSIS must be installed first. Usage:

setup.bat <ExeFolder> [ProductVersion] [InstallerVersion]

Example:

setup.bat release 1.2.39 1.2.3.9

The batch file executes an NSIS script (setup.nsi) which packages the whole ExeFolder and generates the installer. ProductVersion and InstallerVersion are passed to makensis as command line defines; when omitted, the defaults in setup.nsi are used and must be set whenever the application version changes. The installer generated will have the name lmc-<version>-win64.exe and it will be saved to the lmc\setup folder.