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 2800 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_64-20230318.exe

Verify with SHA256 checksum 051a523e645b40f34e9d80f245b42828410208b575b7502de068e65cba1d02d0 or GPG signature by 0xf7a49b0ec.
Run the installer. MSYS2 requires 64 bit Windows 8.1 or newer.
Enter your desired Installation Folder (short ASCII-only path on a NTFS volume, no accents, no spaces, no symlinks, no subst or network drives, no FAT).
When done, click Finish.
Now MSYS2 is ready for you and a terminal for the UCRT64 environment will launch.

You will probably want to install some tools like the mingw-w64 GCC to start compiling:

$ pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (15) mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-binutils-2.39-2
            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-crt-git-10.0.0.r68.g6eb571448-1
            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc-libs-12.2.0-1  mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gmp-6.2.1-3
            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-headers-git-10.0.0.r68.g6eb571448-1
            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-isl-0.25-1  mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libiconv-1.17-1
            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libwinpthread-git-10.0.0.r68.g6eb571448-1
            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-mpc-1.2.1-1  mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-mpfr-4.1.0.p13-1
            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-windows-default-manifest-6.4-4
            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-winpthreads-git-10.0.0.r68.g6eb571448-1
            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-zlib-1.2.12-1  mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-zstd-1.5.2-2
            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc-12.2.0-1

Total Installed Size:  397.59 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]
[... downloading and installation continues ...]

Now you can call gcc to build software for Windows.

$ gcc --version
gcc.exe (Rev1, Built by MSYS2 project) 12.2.0

After installing MSYS2 it will update itself via pacman, see the update guide for more information.

Authors and Contributors

Donations

You can donate to the project via GitHub Sponsors:

or via Open Collective: