MSYS2

Software Distribution and Building Platform for Windows

MSYS2 is a collection of tools and libraries providing you with an easy-to-use environment for building, installing and running native Windows software.

It consists of a command line terminal called mintty, bash, version control systems like git and subversion, tools like tar and awk and even build systems like autotools, all based on a modified version of Cygwin. Despite some of these central parts being based on Cygwin, the main focus of MSYS2 is to provide a build environment for native Windows software and the Cygwin-using parts are kept at a minimum. MSYS2 provides up-to-date native builds for GCC, mingw-w64, CPython, CMake, Meson, OpenSSL, FFmpeg, Rust, Ruby, just to name a few.

To provide easy installation of packages and a way to keep them updated it features a package management system called Pacman, which should be familiar to Arch Linux users. It brings many powerful features such as dependency resolution and simple complete system upgrades, as well as straight-forward and reproducible package building. Our package repository contains more than 1800 pre-built packages ready to install.

For more details see 'What is MSYS2?' which also compares MSYS2 to other software distributions and development environments like Cygwin, WSL, Chocolatey, Scoop, ... and 'Who Is Using MSYS2?' to see which projects are using MSYS2 and what for.

Installation

Download the installer: msys2-x86_64-20201109.exe

SHA256 checksum: 274a11559ede8b892da63dacab30dcf968b811fe21caccc9a1fb9137a5e56062
Run the installer. MSYS2 requires 64 bit Windows 7 or newer.
Click "Next"
Enter Installation Folder (ASCII, no accents, spaces nor symlinks, short path)
Tick Run MSYS2 now
Update the package database and core system packages with:
```
pacman -Syu
```
If needed, close MSYS2, run it again from Start menu. Update the rest with:
```
pacman -Su
```
Now Pacman is fully committed to the Windows cause :)
Take look at Detailed MSYS2 install guide for troubleshooting and additional details on how to keep your MSYS2 up-to-date.