Introduction

Desurium is the open source project for http://desura.com

Who is this for?

This article is written for those who are interested in building the Desurium project.

Coders

Coders should be interested in building the Desurium project to research the code, and hopefully contribute with some of their own code.

Testers

If you aren't a coder but would still like to contribute to the project, then being a tester is great way to do so. The Desurium project needs testers like you to help find issues with the project code, which coders can then fix. I'm not exaggerating when I say that your time and effort to help with testing is more helpful to the project than you think.

Getting Started

Know that everyone on the project appreciates that you're still reading, but before you can start building Desurium on Windows you're going to need some tools. I'm not going to describe how to install these tools, and I will assume you have once we get to the building part of this tutorial.

Tools

CMake

Desurium uses the CMake build system, which allows it to be relatively easily built on a good number of different systems, Windows included. You can get CMake for Windows on the CMake project Download webpage - http://cmake.org/ - Download

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is software from Microsoft that comes with an IDE and most importantly a compiler, amongst other things. Visual Studio can be downloaded for no cost from Microsoft, and this edition of Visual Studio is called Visual Studio Express. Version 11 (VS 2012) can be downloaded from - https://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads There are also versions of Visual Studio that you can pay for, but I mention it here because they can be downloaded for free if you are a student. Check - https://www.dreamspark.com/Student/Default.aspx - and find out if you are eligible. This is however not necessesary to build Desurium.

Python 2

You'll also need Python 2. Installing Python 2 for Windows is easy, just download it here and install it with the default settings.

TortoiseGit

The final tool is TortoiseGit. This tool will help you get the Desurium files, as well as helping you get the newest files easily. Having the newest version of the Desurium files is mandatory for testers, because your issues might already have been fixed. It is also mandatory for coders when you want to contibute your code. We will also download the Desurium files now, so this will be the longest Tools section. To get TortoiseGit, go to - https://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/wiki/Download - and download the Windows version for your architecture. The architecture is either 32bit or 64bit. If you do not know the architecture of your Windows installation, press and hold the Windows key (it's the one that is a flag on your keyboard) and press the "Pause Break" button on your keyboard, or alternatively press the Windows key, right click on Computer (This is what it is called in the English version of Windows), in the drop down menu press properties (Again the English version, but it should be the option at the bottom of the list) and this should bring up the same window. Now look for either 32 bit or 64 bit, it should be next to System Type (English version). Note that this was done in Windows 7, if you are having issues with finding your architecture, search for a solution with http://google.com/

Once you have downloaded TortoiseGit, install it. You might need to restart your computer.

Next step. Find a suitible location where you want the Desura files to be stored and create a new folder there. Call it Desurium. On example location for this folder is C:\Desurium. Now once inside this folder, right click the empty space and press what's called "Git Clone..." in the drop down menu. This will bring up a new window. In this new window you can type in an URL, let it be - git://github.com/lodle/Desurium.git - and leave the Directory part as it is (In case you did make the folder C:\Desurium, this will make a C:\Desurium\Desurium folder, which is the correct thing to do). Leave everything else as it is, and press Ok, it will then download Desurium.

Note that to update Desurium, you have to right click the Desurium\Desurium (C:\Desurium\Desurium) folder, and in the drop down menu, select "Git Sync...", and in the new window press "Pull".

Building with Visual Studio 11

Now let's get started.

Note that this step might fail because there are issues in the Desurium code itself, but do not fret, just go to #desura @ freenode.net - http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=desura - and ask for help there.

Using CMake

First open up CMake (cmake-gui). It should have installed when you installed CMake. In it you can set "Where is the source code", this should be set to the Desurium\Desurium folder (C:\Desurium\Desurium).

Then there's "Where to build the binaries", set it to Desurium\VS11 (C:\Desurium\VS11).

Now press Generate. This should create the Visual Studio 11 project.

Opening Visual Studio 11

In the VS11 folder, there is a file called "Desura" (It's a Microsoft Visual Studio Solution file). Double click it and Visual Studio should open, this might take some time.

When Visual Studio has opened the project, just press F7 and Visual Studio will try to build the project. This might take a while, depending on how powerful your computer is. You are now testing Desurium!