All the tools required are usually installed on a UNIX developer machine. If a tool is not already installed on your system, you will typically use the installation package from your distribution (by your favourite package manager: aptitude, yum, synaptics, ...). If an install package is not available, or you have a reason not to use it (maybe because it's simply too old), you can install that tool from source code. The following sections will provide you with the webpage addresses where you can get these sources.

A quick setup guide for Win32 and Win64 with recommended configuration. Unless you know exactly what you are doing, you should strictly follow the recommendations!

You need to install, in exactly this order: C compiler: Download and install "Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition." (This is a very large download.) Windows SDK for Windows 7, if you want to build 64-bit binaries for Windows 7: Download and install "Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7." In case the install of the SDK fails go to software management and remove the vc++2010 runtime and redist packages (don't worry, they will be added back via the service pack later). If installation of the SDK still fails, there may be a permission problem. See here how to resolve that. C compiler service pack: Download and install "Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1." (This is a very large download.) Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Service Pack 1 Compiler Update for the Windows SDK 7.1, if you want to build 64-bit binaries for Windows 7: Download and install "Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Service Pack 1 Compiler Update for the Windows SDK 7.1." If you will be building 64-bit binaries, those items must be installed in that order, as installing the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 can, if you've installed the Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7, remove the 64-bit compilers, as per the Microsoft Knowledge Base article "FIX: Visual C++ compilers are removed when you upgrade Visual Studio 2010 Professional or Visual Studio 2010 Express to Visual Studio 2010 SP1 if Windows SDK v7.1 is installed". The release notes for the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Service Pack 1 Compiler Update for the Windows SDK 7.1 say that, to ensure that your system has a supported configuration, you must install the items in the order specified above. If you have Microsoft Update installed, so that the Windows update process will update software other than components of Windows, and thus will update Visual Studio, you may need to disable it until after all of the above are installed, to make sure it doesn't install Visual Studio 2010 SP1 out of order. It's possible to compile Wireshark with a wide range of Microsoft C compiler variants. For details see ! Using Cygwin's gcc is not recommended and will certainly not work (at least without a lot of advanced tweaking). For further details on this topic, see . XXX - mention the compiler and PSDK web installers - which significantly reduce download size - and find out the required components Why is this recommended? While this is a huge download, the 2010 Express Edition is the only free (as in beer) version that includes the Visual Studio integrated debugger. Visual C++ 2010 is also used to create official Wireshark builds, so it will likely have fewer development-related problems.

Download the Cygwin installer and start it. At the "Select Packages" page, you'll need to select some additional packages which are not installed by default. Navigate to the required Category/Package row and, if the package has a "Skip" item in the "New" column, click on the "Skip" item so it shows a version number for: Archive/unzip Archive/zip (only needed if you intend to build the U3 package) Base/dos2unix Devel/bison Devel/flex Devel/subversion (optional - see discussion about using Subversion below) Interpreters/perl Utils/patch Web/wget After clicking the Next button several times, the setup will then download and install the selected packages (this may take a while). Why this is recommended: Cygwin's bash version is required, as no native Win32 version is available. As additional packages can easily be added, the perl and alike packages are also used.

Get the Python 2.7 installer from: and install Python into the default location (C:\Python27). Why this is recommended: Cygwin's Python package doesn't work on some machines, so the Win32 native package is recommended.

Please note that the following is not required to build Wireshark, but can be quite helpful when working with the sources. Working with the Subversion source repositories is highly recommended, see . It is much easier to update a personal source tree with Subversion rather than downloading a zip file and merging new sources into a personal source tree "by hand." It also makes first-time setup easy and enables the Wireshark build process to determine your current source code revision. There are several ways in which Subversion can be installed:

Cygwin comes with a command-line Subversion client. To install it, run Cygwin's setup.exe, navigate to Devel/subversion, and if the package has a "Skip" item in the "New" column, click on the "Skip" item so it shows a version number.

There are several binary-distribution Subversion clients available from apache.org. Go to and simply install one.

TortoiseSVN is a native Windows graphical Subversion client for Windows. You can download the setup from and simply install it.

It's a good idea to successfully compile and run Wireshark at least once before you start hacking the Wireshark sources for your own project! This example uses TortoiseSVN but another Subversion client would work as well. Download sources : Download Wireshark sources into: C:\wireshark using TortoiseSVN right click on the C:\ drive in Windows Explorer in the upcoming context menu select "SVN checkout..." and then set: URL of repository: " http://anonsvn.wireshark.org/wireshark/trunk/" Checkout directory: C:\wireshark TortoiseSVN might ask you to create this directory - say yes TortoiseSVN starts downloading the sources if the download fails you may be behind a restrictive firewall, see for alternative download methods Edit config.nmake: edit the settings in C:\wireshark\config.nmake, especially: VERSION_EXTRA : Give Wireshark your "private" version info, e.g.: -myprotocol123 - to distinguish it from an official release! PROGRAM_FILES : Where your programs reside, usually just keep the default: C:\Program Files 1 MSVC_VARIANT : Make sure the variant for your compiler is uncommented, and that all others are commented out. For example, if you're using Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition, find the line and remove the comment character (#) from the beginning of the line. Then, find the line and comment it out, by prefixing a hash (#). 2 1International Windows might use different values here, e.g. a German version uses C:\Programme - take this also in account where C:\Program Files appears elsewhere. 2Compiler dependent: This step depends on the compiler you are using. For compilers other than Visual C++ 2010, see the table at .

Prepare cmd.exe - set environment and current dir. start cmd.exe set environment variables for Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition:1,2 to build 32-bit binaries call "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\SetEnv.Cmd" /Release /x86 and to build 64-bit binaries call "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin\SetEnv.Cmd" /Release /x64 If your version of the compiler does not have SetEnv.Cmd, you may need to use vcvarsall.bat or vcvars32.bat which do much the same thing as SetEnv.cmd. For example, on some 64-bit installations, one would build a 32-bit version by invoking C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin\vcvars32.bat and one would build a 64-bit version using the command C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\Vcvarsall.bat amd64 Consult your compiler's documentation to learn which version applies to your installation. set environment variable to select target platform to build 32-bit binaries execute set WIRESHARK_TARGET_PLATFORM=win32 and to build 64-bit binaries execute set WIRESHARK_TARGET_PLATFORM=win64 cd C:\wireshark to jump into the source directory 1International Windows might use different values here, e.g. a German version uses C:\Programme - take this also in account where C:\Program Files appears elsewhere. Note: You need to repeat steps 1 - 4 each time you open a new cmd.exe! 2Compiler dependent: This step depends on the compiler variant used, for other variants than the recommended Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition see the table at ! Wireshark development depends on several additional environment variables, particularly PATH. You can use a batch script to fill these in, along with the Visual C++ variables; for example:

After you've installed the Wireshark sources (see ), you can check the correct installation of all tools by using the verify_tools target of the Makefile.nmake from the source package. You will need the Wireshark sources and some tools (nmake, bash) installed, before this verification is able to work. Enter at the command line (cmd.exe, not Cygwin's bash!): > nmake -f Makefile.nmake verify_tools This will check for the various tools needed to build Wireshark: If you have problems with all the first three items (cl, link, nmake), check that you called SetEnv.Cmd as mentioned in (which will "fix" your PATH settings). However, the exact text will be slightly different depending on the MSVC version used. Unfortunately, the link command is defined both in Cygwin and in MSVC each with completely different functionality; you'll need the MSVC link. If your link command looks something like: /usr/bin/link, the link command of Cygwin takes precedence over the MSVC one. To fix this, you can change your PATH environment setting or simply rename the link.exe in Cygwin. If you rename it, make sure to remember that a Cygwin update may provide a new version of it. Make sure that the other tools found are the Cygwin versions. Some build problems have been caused by incompatible versions of grep and unzip.

If you've closed cmd.exe in the meantime, prepare cmd.exe again. nmake -f Makefile.nmake setup downloads libraries using wget and installs them - this may take a while ... If the download fails you may be behind a restrictive firewall, see the proxy comment in . Note that 32-bit versions of the software require 32-bit versions of the libraries and that 64-bit versions require 64-bit libraries. The build process creates independent directories for each as needed. See for how to use SetEnv.Cmd and WIRESHARK_TARGET_PLATFORM to select either a 32- or 64-bit build.

The released Wireshark sources contain files that are prepared for a UNIX build (e.g. config.h). You must distclean your sources before building the first time! If you've closed cmd.exe in the meantime, prepare cmd.exe again nmake -f Makefile.nmake distclean to cleanup the Wireshark sources

Now it's time to build Wireshark ... If you've closed cmd.exe in the meantime, prepare cmd.exe again nmake -f Makefile.nmake all to build Wireshark wait for Wireshark to compile - this may take a while! run C:\wireshark\wireshark-gtk2\wireshark.exe and check if it starts check Help/About if it shows your "private" program version, e.g.: Version &WiresharkCurrentVersion;.x-myprotocol123 - you might run a release version previously installed! Tip: If compilation fails for suspicious reasons after you changed some source files try to "distclean" the sources and make "all" again

XXX - debug needs to be written, e.g. an idea is the create a simple MSVC workspace/project(s) to ease Visual Studio debugging

Detailed information to build these guides can be found in the file docbook/README.txt in the Wireshark sources.

Note: You should have successfully built Wireshark before doing the following! If you want to build your own wireshark-win32-&WiresharkCurrentVersion;.x-myprotocol123.exe, you'll need NSIS. NSIS: Download and install NSIS You may check the MAKENSIS setting in the file config.nmake of the Wireshark sources. Note that the 32-bit version of NSIS will work for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Wireshark. Runtime redistributable: to build a 32-bit version you will need vcredist_x86.exe : Download the C-Runtime redistributable for Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition SP1 (vcredist_x86.exe) and copy it into C:\wireshark-win32-libs 1 To build a 64-bit version, you will need vcredist_x64.exe : Download the 64-bit redistributable for Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition SP1 (vcredist_x64.exe) and copy it into C:\Wireshark-win64-libs1 If you've closed cmd.exe in the meantime, prepare cmd.exe again nmake -f Makefile.nmake packaging build Wireshark installer run C:\wireshark\packaging\nsis\wireshark-win32-&WiresharkCurrentVersion;.x-myprotocol123.exe and test it - it's a good idea to test also on a different machine than the developer machine. 1Compiler dependent: This step depends on the compiler variant used; for other variants than the recommended Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition SP1 see the table at !