How to install and use "make" in Windows?

I'm following the instructions of someone whose repository I cloned to my machine. I want to use the make command as part of setting up the code environment, but I'm using Windows. I searched online, but I could only find a make.exe file, a make-4.1.tar.gz file (I don't know what to do with it next) and instructions for how to download MinGW (for GNU; but after installing it I didn't find any mention of "make").

How do I use make in Windows without a GNU compiler or related packages?

make is a GNU command so the only way you can get it on Windows is installing a Windows version like the one provided by GNUWin32. Anyway, there are several options for getting that:

1. The most simple choice is using Chocolatey. First you need to install this package manager. Once installed you simlpy need to install make (you may need to run it in an elevated/admin command prompt) :

   choco install make
   

2. Other recommended option is installing a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL/WSL2), so you'll have a Linux distribution of your choice embedded in Windows 10 where you'll be able to install make, gccand all the tools you need to build C programs.

3. For older Windows versions (MS Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008 / 7 with msvcrt.dll) you can use GnuWin32.

An outdated alternative was MinGw, but the project seems to be abandoned so it's better to go for one of the previous choices.

GNU make is available on chocolatey.

• Install chocolatey from here.

• Then, choco install make.

Now you will be able to use Make on windows.
I've tried using it on MinGW, but it should work on CMD as well.

The accepted answer is a bad idea in general because the manually created make.exe will stick around and can potentially cause unexpected problems. It actually breaks RubyInstaller: https://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller2/issues/105

An alternative is installing make via Chocolatey (as pointed out by @Vasantha Ganesh K)

Another alternative is installing MSYS2 from Chocolatey and using make from C:\tools\msys64\usr\bin. If make isn't installed automatically with MSYS2 you need to install it manually via pacman -S make (as pointed out by @Thad Guidry and @Luke).

If you're using Windows 10, it is built into the Linux subsystem feature. Just launch a Bash prompt (press the Windows key, then type bash and choose "Bash on Ubuntu on Windows"), cd to the directory you want to make and type make.

FWIW, the Windows drives are found in /mnt, e.g. C:\ drive is /mnt/c in Bash.

If Bash isn't available from your start menu, here are instructions for turning on that Windows feature (64-bit Windows only):

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

Download make.exe from their official site GnuWin32

• In the Download session, click Complete package, except sources.

• Follow the installation instructions.

• Once finished, add the <installation directory>/bin/ to the PATH variable.

Now you will be able to use make in cmd.

1. Install Msys2 http://www.msys2.org
2. Follow installation instructions
3. Install make with $ pacman -S make gettext base-devel
4. Add C:\msys64\usr\bin\ to your path

I could suggest a step by step approach.

1. Visit GNUwin
2. Download the Setup Program
3. Follow the instructions and install GNUWin. You should pay attention to the directory where your application is being installed. (You will need it later1)
4. Follow these instructions and add make to your environment variables. As I told you before, now it is time to know where your application was installed. FYI: The default directory is C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\.
5. Now, update the PATH to include the bin directory of the newly installed program. A typical example of what one might add to the path is: ...;C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin

Another alternative is if you already installed minGW and added the bin folder the to Path environment variable, you can use "mingw32-make" instead of "make".

You can also create a symlink from "make" to "mingw32-make", or copying and changing the name of the file. I would not recommend the options before, they will work until you do changes on the minGW.

The chances are that besides GNU make, you'll also need many of the coreutils. Touch, rm, cp, sed, test, tee, echo and the like. The build system might require bash features, if for nothing else, it's popular to create temp file names from the process ID ($$$$). That won't work without bash. You can get everything with the popular POSIX emulators for Windows:

• Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.org/) Probably the most popular one and the most compatible with POSIX. Has some difficulties with Windows paths and it's slow.
• GNUWin (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/) It was good and fast but now abandoned. No bash provided, but it's possible to use it from other packages.
• ezwinports (https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports) My current favorite. Fast and works well. There is no bash provided with it, that can be a problem for some build systems. It's possible to use make from ezwinports and bash from Cygwin or MSYS2 as a workaround.
• MSYS 1.19 abandoned. Worked well but featured very old make (3.86 or so)
• MSYS2 (https://www.msys2.org/) Works well, second fastest solution after ezwinports. Good quality, package manager (pacman), all tooling available. I'd recommend this one.
• MinGW abandoned? There was usually MSYS 1.19 bundled with MinGW packages, that contained an old make.exe. Use mingw32-make.exe from the package, that's more up to date.

Note that you might not be able to select your environment. If the build system was created for Cygwin, it might not work in other environments without modifications (The make language is the same, but escaping, path conversion are working differently, $(realpath) fails on Windows paths, DOS bat files are started as shell scripts and many similar issues). If it's from Linux, you might need to use a real Linux or WSL. If the compiler is running on Linux, there is no point in installing make for Windows, because you'll have to run both make and the compiler on Linux. In the same way, if the compiler is running on Windows, WSL won't help, because in that environment you can only execute Linux tools, not Windows executables. It's a bit tricky!

One solution that may helpful if you want to use the command line emulator cmder. You can install the package installer chocately. First we install chocately in windows command prompt using the following line:

@"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
refreshenv

After chocolatey is installed the choco command can be used to install make. Once installed, you will need add an alias to /cmder/config/user_aliases.cmd. The following line should be added:

make="path_to_chocolatey\chocolatey\bin\make.exe" $*

Make will then operate in the cmder environment.

1. Install npm

2. install Node

3. Install Make

   node install make up
   node install make
   

4. If above commands displays any error then install Chocolatey(choco)

5. Open cmd and copy and paste the below command (command copied from chocolatey URL)

   @"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command " [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"
   

I once had the same problem. But I am surprised not to find one particular solution here.

Installation from GnuWin32 or via winget are good and easy options. But I only found make 3.8.1 there. This version lacks the very important option -O, which handles the output correctly when compiling multithreaded.

choco appears to offer make 4.3, currently. So one could expect recent versions there.

But there is also the option of self compiling. And if you have to install make, which is used for compiling, this should be a valid option.

1. head to https://www.gnu.org/software/make/ and download a version of your liking
2. unpack the tar.gz files (use 7zip and unpack the file twice to retrieve the actual content)
3. navigate to the created directory
4. open command prompt in that directory
5. run build_w32.bat gcc This will start the compilation with the gcc compiler, which you would need to install in advance. When running build_w32.bat without any option they try to use the MSVC compiler. Sidenote: I found it surprising that gnu does not use gcc as default but MSVC :-)
6. ignore the warnings created during compilation. The result should still be fine
7. retrieve your fresh gnumake.exe from the directoy GccRel (when compiled with gcc)
8. put this file somewhere where you like and rename to make.exe
9. add the location to the system variable %PATH%

As others have noted: This manual installation might cause conflicts if you have various make versions installed by other programs as well.