MinGW scripts for building portable GRASS GIS on MS Windows

This repository contains MinGW scripts for building portable GRASS GIS on 64-bit MS Windows (not tested on 32-bit systems). These scripts will compile a personal portable daily build. Official daily builds from the GRASS GIS development team are available from here.

Please refer to How to compile GRASS GIS on MS Windows to see why I created these scripts in the first place, but I found another use case: portability with no administrative rights.

See grass-build-scripts for cross-compilation for MS Windows.

OSGeo4W installation without administrative rights

The OSGeo4W installer requires administrative rights, but most IT departments, if not all, in many institutes and universities do not give out administrative rights to faculty and students. They may provide a means for installing selected software from their proprietary software center, but, usually, not all packages are maintained up to date. I have personally experienced this problem and my students were not able to install the latest daily build of GRASS GIS.

Just extracting to C:\

My solution was to build it myself daily and deploy it to a shared folder so they can extract it to their C drive. This is possible because MS Windows allows non-administrators to create new folders in the root of the C drive (but not new files there). You can download the latest daily build of GRASS GIS from here.

Portability

You can extract this build to anywhere including external USB drives to make GRASS GIS portable. Just run E:\OSGeo4W\opt\grass\grass.bat where E: is your external drive.

How to compile the latest version of GRASS GIS

Again, 32-bit systems were not tested.

Preparing a building environment

1. Start a cmd window and run the following command to install OSGeo4W to C:\OSGeo4W:

   osgeo4w-setup.exe -A -g -k -q -s https://download.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/v2/x86_64/ -P python3-wxpython,python3-pywin32,proj-devel,gdal-devel,liblas-devel,netcdf-devel,geos-devel,libtiff-devel,libpng-devel,sqlite3-devel,cairo-devel,freetype-devel,zstd-devel

2. Install MSYS2 to C:\msys64.
3. Start MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit and run the following command:

   pacman --noconfirm -S tar libintl make flex bison diffutils git dos2unix zip mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc libbz2-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-libsystre mingw-w64-x86_64-fftw mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config

4. Compile GRASS GIS.

   # add two export lines to ~/.bash_profile
   cat <<'EOT' >> ~/.bash_profile
   export LC_ALL=C
   export PATH="/c/osgeo4w/bin:/mingw64/bin:$PATH"
   export PROJ_LIB="/c/osgeo4w/share/proj"
   export PYTHONHOME="/c/osgeo4w/apps/python39"
   EOT
   
   # source ~/.bash_profile
   . ~/.bash_profile
   
   mkdir -p ~/usr/local/src
   cd ~/usr/local/src
   
   # download the GRASS build scripts in ~/usr/local/src/grass-mingw-scripts
   git clone https://github.com/HuidaeCho/grass-mingw-scripts.git
   
   # download the GRASS source code in ~/usr/local/src/grass
   git clone https://github.com/OSGeo/grass.git

Now, you're ready to build GRASS GIS and don't need to repeat these steps again.

Building and packaging GRASS GIS

Copy .grassmingwrc-example to $HOME/.grassmingwrc and edit it to your paths. Start MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit and run the following command:

build.sh --package

The build.sh script will build GRASS GIS in ~/usr/local/src/grass/dist.x86_64-w64-mingw32 and optionally package it as ~/usr/local/src/grass/grass83-x86_64-w64-mingw32-osgeo4w64-YYYYMMDD.zip, which you can simply extract to any drive on other computers without administrative rights.

Scheduling daily builds

You can schedule daily builds and, optionally, copy the latest package to deployment directories (U:\Shared\Software in this example).

1. Press the Windows key, type and run Task Scheduler.
2. Click Create Basic Task....
3. Set Name to Daily GRASS Builds and click Next.
4. Select Daily and click Next.
5. Set your preferred start time and click Next.
6. Select Start a program and click Next.
7. Set Program/script to C:\msys64\usr\bin\bash.exe, Add arguments to -l ~/usr/local/src/grass-mingw-scripts/deploy.sh /u/shared/software, and click Next.
8. Click Finish.

Autocompletion in the cmd window

GRASS GIS has a lot of command-line modules and I sometimes rely on autocompletion to find some module names in Linux. However, in MS Windows, the cmd window has limited autocompletion features compared to the bash shell and does not allow me to complete command names. You may want to replace the default shell with the MSYS shell by uncommenting GRASS_SH in C:\OSGeo4W\opt\grass\etc\env.bat, but GRASS modules written in Python won't work because batch file wrappers cannot be executed properly from the MSYS shell. You would have to type full batch filenames including .bat, but, even then, it would fail with @%GRASS_PYTHON%: command not found. The MSYS shell cannot just handle batch files nicely.

I found a great autocompletion utility called Clink. It runs with the cmd window and supports command name completion. The easiest way to run Clink with cmd is to use its autorun install.

clink autorun install

Clink will automatically run whenever you start cmd.

BusyBox for Windows

Alternatively, you can use BusyBox for Windows.

build.sh --busybox --package