Skip to content

BUILD-WINDOWS.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
297 lines (201 loc) · 9.7 KB

BUILD-WINDOWS.md

File metadata and controls

297 lines (201 loc) · 9.7 KB
Raw

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/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi/releases

If you're definitely sure you want to build your own release, then we really hope that these instructions help.

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. Build Sonic Pi using a command line script
  3. Start your new Sonic Pi using your newly built .exe file.

Notes

  • ARM64 Windows (e.g. Qualcomm Snapdragon / Surface Laptop) builds natively with the very same scripts — see Building for ARM64 at the end for the handful of prerequisite differences.
  • If you have any issues building Sonic Pi on Windows please open up an issue on GitHub and we'll try our best to assist you: https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi/issues
  • The current build on Windows is assumed to be a 64 bit build done with Visual Studio 2026 (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.

1. Installing Dependencies

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

  1. Visual Studio 2026
  2. Qt 6 (a recent release — 6.9 or newer, latest strongly recommended)
  3. CMake (3.29+)
  4. Ruby (4.0+)
  5. Rust (for the SuperSonic audio engine's native MIDI subsystem)

Let's look at each in turn.

1.1 Install - Visual Studio 2026

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/

Note that you need to enable the "Desktop development with C++" workload. See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/vscpp-step-0-installation?view=msvc-170#step-4---choose-workloads

1.2 Install - Qt

Install a recent Qt 6 (6.9 or newer — the latest release is strongly recommended, as Sonic Pi's GUI benefits from ongoing Qt fixes; Qt 5 is not supported). Use the online installer and pick the 64-bit MSVC build:

https://www.qt.io/download-qt-installer

When selecting Qt components you need:

  • MSVC 2022 64-bit
  • Additional Libraries
    • Qt Positioning
    • Qt WebChannel
    • Qt WebEngine
    • Qt WebSockets

If you didn't select these components when you first installed Qt, you can always open MaintenanceTool.exe (found within the Qt directory) which will enable you to update and select/deselect specific components to modify the existing installation.

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 6.11.1 then you could run:

setx QT_INSTALL_LOCATION C:\Qt\6.11.1\msvc2022_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 (4.0.x - 64 bit with devkit). Grab the newest rubyinstaller-devkit-4.0.x-*-x64.exe from:

https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller2/releases

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 rugged

This uses the Ruby library management tool gem to install rugged which is used to store the code diffs in a local Git repository.

1.5 Install - Rust

The SuperSonic audio engine (built from source as part of the build) has a native MIDI subsystem written in Rust, so cargo must be on your PATH when the build configures. Install the toolchain from:

https://rustup.rs

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 --recurse-submodules https://github.com/sonic-pi-net/sonic-pi.git C:\dev\sonic-pi

(The --recurse-submodules flag fetches the SuperSonic audio engine at app/external/supersonic. If you forget it, the win-prebuild.bat script will run git submodule update --init --recursive for you on first run.)

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/sonic-pi-net/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:\Ruby40-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:\Ruby40-x64 then you'd do the following:

cd C:\dev\sonic-pi\app\server\native
mklink /d ruby C:\Ruby40-x64

3. Running the Build

Now we're ready to build everything. This is achieved with one single command 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 Move to the app directory

Firstly, we need to change to the app directory at the root of the Sonic Pi repository:

cd C:\dev\sonic-pi\app

3.2 Build All

Next we run the build-all script for Windows:

win-build-all.bat

4. Start Sonic Pi

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

gui\Release\sonic-pi.exe

Or from anywhere using the full path:

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

Building for ARM64

ARM64 Windows (e.g. Qualcomm Snapdragon devices like the Surface Laptop 7th Edition) builds natively with the same scripts as x64 — the build system auto-detects the host architecture and selects the correct vcpkg triplet (arm64-windows-static-md) and CMake generator flag (-A ARM64) automatically. Everything, including the SuperSonic audio engine, is built from source for ARM64; there is nothing to prebuild by hand.

Goal: every binary runs as native ARM64 — no x86/x64 emulation.

Only the prerequisites differ from the x64 steps above:

  • Visual Studio 2026 — under Individual Components, add MSVC ARM64/ARM64EC build tools. Note that on ARM64 Windows, VS installs to C:\Program Files (x86)\, not C:\Program Files\ — anything that hunts for vcvarsall.bat must check both locations.
  • Ruby — install the ARM64 RubyInstaller build and verify with ruby -e "puts RUBY_PLATFORM" (should print aarch64-mingw-ucrt). Link it the same way, e.g. mklink /j ruby C:\Ruby40-arm. ARM64 Ruby ships without YJIT (that needs Rust at Ruby's own build time), so you'll see a harmless startup warning.
  • Rust — install the ARM64 rustup toolchain (same reason as x64: the SuperSonic MIDI subsystem).
  • Qt — install the ARM64 build. The aqtinstall CLI is the easy way: 
    pip install aqtinstall
aqt install-qt windows desktop 6.11.1 win64_msvc2022_arm64 -m qtsvg qttools qttranslations -O C:\Qt
setx QT_INSTALL_LOCATION C:\Qt\6.11.1\msvc2022_arm64

Then build exactly as above — win-prebuild.bat, win-config.bat, win-build-gui.bat Release — deploy the Qt DLLs with windeployqt, and run app\build\gui\Release\sonic-pi.exe. On first launch, Windows Defender may delay audio startup by up to 20 seconds while it scans the freshly built supersonic.exe; add it to Defender's process exclusion list to avoid this on subsequent launches.

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.
  • 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
  • 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.