How to distribute a GTK+ application on Windows?

Question

I have installed GTK+ (specifically GTK3) via MSYS and MinGW on Windows. I now want to copy the GTK+ dlls to my application directory so that it can be run on a computer wit

Answer 1

ldd kangaroo.exe | grep '\/mingw64\/bin\/.*dll' -o | xargs -I{} cp "{}" .

Answer 2

The following procedure can be used to obtain the necessary DLLs:

1. Download Listdlls
2. Leave your application running
3. Open the PowerShell window where Listdlls.exe is located
4. Use the command ./Listdlls.exe application_name.exe
5. Copy all listed paths to a text file
6. Delete all lines that contain "C:\WINDOWS*" in your text file
7. Leave only the lines that contain "C:\msys64*...*.dll" in your text file
8. Open Msys2 Shell
9. Use $ cp "paste_all_paths_from_dlls" "destination_path"

Cautions before using the $ cp command. In your text file, change "\" to "/" in the paths and remove line breaks.

Answer 3

You have some hints on the Windows page of the GTK website. This is the section named Building and distributing your application. It features a blog post about distributing a GTK application on Windows.

The solution proposed there is to create a MSYS2 package for your application, and then install it and all its dependencies (GTK among them) in a specific directory, so that you can redistribute the whole package.

Answer 4

It turns out that running ldd mygtkapp.exe (with the ldd provided with MinGW) gave me a listing of all the dlls required to let it run. To get only the dlls which were gtk dependencies (and not e.g. Win32 dlls) I used the following command: ldd mygtkapp.exe | sed -n 's/\([^ ]*\) => \/mingw.*/\1/p' | sort. My program used the Haskell bindings, so the dependencies might be a bit different, but this is what I got:

libatk-1.0-0.dll
libbz2-1.dll
libcairo-2.dll
libcairo-gobject-2.dll
libepoxy-0.dll
libexpat-1.dll
libffi-6.dll
libfontconfig-1.dll
libfreetype-6.dll
libgcc_s_seh-1.dll
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0-0.dll
libgdk-3-0.dll
libgio-2.0-0.dll
libglib-2.0-0.dll
libgmodule-2.0-0.dll
libgobject-2.0-0.dll
libgraphite2.dll
libgthread-2.0-0.dll
libgtk-3-0.dll
libharfbuzz-0.dll
libiconv-2.dll
libintl-8.dll
libpango-1.0-0.dll
libpangocairo-1.0-0.dll
libpangoft2-1.0-0.dll
libpangowin32-1.0-0.dll
libpcre-1.dll
libpixman-1-0.dll
libpixman-1-0.dll
libpng16-16.dll
libstdc++-6.dll
libwinpthread-1.dll
zlib1.dll

Note also that there are a couple of other things you need to do to make a completely standalone application, particularly if you're using stock icons; for more details on this, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/34673860/7345298. Note however that I needed to copy the 16x16 directory instead of the scalable directory.

EDIT: I've actually found the following command to be very useful as well: ldd mygtkapp.exe | grep '\/mingw.*\.dll' -o | xargs -I{} cp "{}" .. This command actually copies the dlls to the current directory obviating the need to laboriously do it yourself.