Running Electrum from source on Windows (development version)

Prerequisites

• python3
• git

Main steps

1. Check out the code from GitHub:

> git clone https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum.git
> cd electrum
> git submodule update --init

Run install (this should install most dependencies):

> python3 -m pip install --user -e ".[gui,crypto]"

2. Install libsecp256k1

libsecp256k1 is a required dependency. This is a C library, which you need to compile yourself. Electrum needs a dll, named libsecp256k1-0.dll (or newer libsecp256k1-*.dll), placed into the inner electrum/ folder.

For Unix-like systems, the (contrib/make_libsecp256k1.sh) script does this for you, however it does not work on Windows. If you have access to a Linux machine (e.g. VM) or perhaps even using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), you can cross-compile from there to Windows, and build this dll:

$ GCC_TRIPLET_HOST="x86_64-w64-mingw32" ./contrib/make_libsecp256k1.sh

Alternatively, MSYS2 and MinGW-w64 can be used directly on Windows, as follows.

• download and install MSYS2
• run MSYS2
• inside the MSYS2 shell:

  $ pacman -Syu
  $ pacman -S --needed git base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-x86_64-autotools
  $ export PATH="$PATH:/mingw64/bin"
  cd into the git clone, e.g. C:\wspace\electrum (auto-mounted at /c/wspace/electrum)

  $ cd /c/wspace/electrum
  $ GCC_TRIPLET_HOST="x86_64-w64-mingw32" ./contrib/make_libsecp256k1.sh

(note: this is a bit cumbersome, see issue #5976 for discussion)

3. Run electrum:

> python3 ./run_electrum