Building Under Windows

Building Under Windows#

Note

Conda contains a pre-built up-to-date 64 bit Windows binary. It is fully-featured, and if you do not need anything custom, it is likely the fastest way to get going.

Introduction#

Pre-built binary packages for Windows are available via Conda (64-bit version), and all of the prerequisites required for compilation of a fully featured build are also available via that packaging system. This document assumes you will be using Conda Forge as your base, and anything more advanced is beyond the scope of the document.

Note

The GitHub Action build system uses the PDAL project’s configuration on the Conda Forge system. It contains a rich resource of known working examples. See PDAL/PDAL and PDAL/PDAL for inspiration.

Required Compiler#

PDAL is known to compile on Visual Studio 2015, and 2013 might work with some source tree adjustments. PDAL makes heavy use of C++11, and a compiler with good support for those features is required.

Prerequisite Libraries#

PDAL uses the GitHub Actions continuous integration platform for building and testing itself on Windows. The configuration that PDAL uses is valuable raw materials for configuring your own environment because the PDAL team must keep it up to date with both the Conda environment and the Microsoft compiler situation.

You can see the current configuration at PDAL/PDAL The most interesting bits are the Setup step, the CMake step, and the Compile scripts. The configuration already has Miniconda installed, and the setup.sh script installs all of PDAL’s prerequisites via the command line.

conda install geotiff laszip nitro curl ^
   gdal pcl cmake eigen ninja libgdal ^
   zstd numpy xz libxml2 laz-perf qhull ^
   sqlite hdf5 tiledb conda-build ninja -y

Note

The package list here might change over time. The canonnical location to learn the prerequisite list for PDAL is the scripts/ci/win directory in PDAL’s source tree.

Fetching the Source#

Get the source code for PDAL. Presumably you have GitHub for Windows or something like it. Run a “git shell” and clone the repository into the directory of your choice.

c:\dev> git clone https://github.com/PDAL/PDAL.git

Switch to the -maintenance branch.

c:\dev> git checkout 1.9-maintenance

Note

PDAL’s active development branch is master, and you are welcome to build it, but is not as stable as the major-versioned release branches are likely to be.

Configuration#

PDAL uses CMake for its build configuration. You will need to install CMake and have it available on your path to configure PDAL.

Invoke your cmake command to configure the PDAL.

cmake -G "NMake Makefiles" .

A fully-featured build will require more specification of libraries, enabled features, and their locations. For more information on this, users can refer to the examples.sh step in the Action.

Note

Placing your command in a .bat file will make for easy reuse.

Building#

If you chose NMake Makefiles as your CMake generator, you can invoke the build by calling nmake:

nmake /f Makefile

If you chose “Visual Studio 14 Win64” as your CMake generator, open PDAL.sln and chose your configuration to build.

Running#

After you’ve built the tree, you can run pdal.exe by issuing it

c:\dev\pdal\bin\pdal.exe

Note

You may need to have your Conda environment active to enable access to PDAL’s dependencies.