Windows build

Pre-requisites

You need to install the following:

Git: https://git-scm.com/
Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org/
Visual Studio with C++: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/features/cplusplus/
pwsh (grab the latest PowerShell release on GitHub: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/latest)

Build Environment installation

You can follow the lines of the scripts from the ci folder. The scripts can also be launched as-is for local installation. Perform a git clone of the nrn repository.

From a powershell with administrator priviledges, run:

PS C:\workspace\nrn> .\ci\win_download_deps.cmd

This will download all required installers and corresponding versions(Python, MPI, nsis)

Then launch the installation script:

PS C:\workspace\nrn> .\ci\win_install_deps.cmd

in order to:

install all downloaded Python versions and for each:
- fix MSVCC version
- fix MSVC runtime library
- install numpy
install nsis and required plugin
install MPI
install MSYS2 (via Chocolatey) and then MinGW toolchain and required build pacakages

How to build NEURON

For a complete build/install/create setup.exe, in a MinGW64 shell you can run:

$ bash ci/win_build_cmake.sh

As you can see in the script, a typical configuration would be:

/mingw64/bin/cmake .. \
	-G 'Unix Makefiles'  \
	-DNRN_ENABLE_MPI_DYNAMIC=ON  \
	-DNRN_ENABLE_MPI=ON  \
	-DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH='/c/msmpi'  \
	-DNRN_ENABLE_INTERVIEWS=ON  \
	-DNRN_ENABLE_PYTHON=ON  \
	-DNRN_ENABLE_RX3D=ON  \
	-DNRN_RX3D_OPT_LEVEL=2 \
	-DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/c/Python38/python.exe \
	-DNRN_ENABLE_PYTHON_DYNAMIC=ON  \
	-DNRN_PYTHON_DYNAMIC='c:/Python38/python.exe;c:/Python39/python.exe;c:/Python310/python.exe;c:/Python311/python.exe'  \
	-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX='/c/nrn-install' \
	-DMPI_CXX_LIB_NAMES:STRING=msmpi \
	-DMPI_C_LIB_NAMES:STRING=msmpi \
	-DMPI_msmpi_LIBRARY:FILEPATH=c:/msmpi/lib/x64/msmpi.lib

To create the Windows installer, you need to run:

make install
make setup_exe