Chocolatey is a native package manager for Windows. There are packages for most of the software listed below. Along with traditional Windows packages it supports the Python Package Index.

Chocolatey tends to install packages into its own path (%ChocolateyInstall%), although packages are free to use their own preferences (Python for example is installed to C:\Python37). You can install Chocolatey packages using the command choco install (or its shorthand, cinst), e.g.

> rem Flex is required.
> choco install -y winflexbison3
> rem Git, CMake, Perl, Python, etc are also required, but can be installed
> rem via their respective installation packages.
> choco install -y git cmake strawberryperl python3

Download and install “Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition”. This is a small utility that downloads all the other required parts (which are quite large).

Check the checkbox for “Desktop development with C++” and then uncheck all the optional components other than the “VC++ 2019” item with the “latest …​ tools”, the “Windows 10 SDK”, and the “Visual C++ tools for CMake” (unless you want to use them for purposes other than Wireshark).

You can use Chocolatey to install Visual Studio, using the Visual Studio Community and Native Desktop workload packages.

PS$> choco install -y visualstudio2019community visualstudio2019-workload-nativedesktop

You can use other Microsoft C compiler variants, but VS2019 is used to build the development releases and is the preferred option. It’s possible to compile Wireshark with a wide range of Microsoft C compiler variants. For details see Section 4.5, “Microsoft compiler toolchain (Windows native)”.

You may have to do this as Administrator.

Compiling with gcc or Clang is not recommended and will certainly not work (at least not without a lot of advanced tweaking). For further details on this topic, see Section 4.4, “GNU Compiler Toolchain (UNIX And UNIX-like Platforms)”. This may change in future as releases of Visual Studio add more cross-platform support.

Why is this recommended? While this is a huge download, the Community Editions of Visual Studio are free (as in beer) and include the Visual Studio integrated debugger. Visual Studio 2019 is also used to create official Wireshark builds, so it will likely have fewer development-related problems.

The main Wireshark application uses the Qt windowing toolkit. To install Qt, go to the “Download Qt” page, select “Go open source”, download the Qt Online Installer for Windows from the Qt Project and select, for the desired Qt version, a component that matches your target system and compiler. For example, at the time of this writing the Qt 5.12.1 “msvc2017 64-bit” component is used to build the official 64-bit packages. The “Qt Debug Information Files” component contains PDB files which can be used for debugging. You can deselect all of the other the components such as “Qt Charts” or “Android xxxx” as they aren’t required.

Note that installation of separate Qt components are required for 32 bit and 64 bit builds, e.g. “msvc2017 32-bit” and “msvc2017 64-bit”. The environment variable QT5_BASE_DIR should be set as appropriate for your environment and should point to the Qt directory that contains the bin directory, e.g. C:\Qt\5.12.5\msvc2017_64

The Qt maintenance tool (C:\Qt\MaintenanceTool.exe) can be used to upgrade Qt to newer versions.

Get a Python 3.x installer from https://python.org/download/ and install Python into the default location (C:\Python37).

Alternatively you can install Python using Chocolatey:

PS$> choco install -y python3

Chocolatey installs Python in C:\Python37 by default.

Get a Perl installer from http://strawberryperl.com/ or https://www.activestate.com/ and install Perl into the default location.

Alternatively you can install Perl using Chocolatey:

PS$> choco install -y strawberryperl
# ...or...
PS$> choco install -y activeperl

Please note that the following is not required to build Wireshark but can be quite helpful when working with the sources.

Working with the Git source repositories is highly recommended, as described in Section 3.4, “Obtaining The Wireshark Sources”. It is much easier to update a personal source tree (local repository) with Git rather than downloading a zip file and merging new sources into a personal source tree by hand. It also makes first-time setup easy and enables the Wireshark build process to determine your current source code revision.

There are several ways in which Git can be installed. Most packages are available at the URLs below or via Chocolatey. Note that many of the GUI interfaces depend on the command line version.

If installing the Windows version of git select the Use Git from the Windows Command Prompt (in chocolatey the /GitOnlyOnPath option). Do not select the Use Git and optional Unix tools from the Windows Command Prompt option (in chocolatey the /GitAndUnixToolsOnPath option).

PS$> choco install -y git

Get the CMake installer from https://cmake.org/download/ and install CMake into the default location. Ensure the directory containing cmake.exe is added to your path.

Alternatively you can install CMake using Chocolatey:

PS$> choco install -y cmake

Chocolatey ensures cmake.exe is on your path.

Asciidoctor can be run directly as a Ruby script or via a Java wrapper (AsciidoctorJ). It is used in conjunction with Xsltproc and DocBook to generate the documentation you’re reading and the User’s Guide.

The easiest way to install them on Windows is via Chocolatey:

PS$> choco install -y asciidoctorj xsltproc docbook-bundle

Chocolatey ensures that asciidoctorj.exe and xsltproc.exe is on your path and that xsltproc uses the DocBook catalog.

Get the winFlexBison installer from https://sourceforge.net/projects/winflexbison/ and install into the default location. Ensure the directory containing win_flex.exe and win_bison.exe is on your path.

Alternatively you can install Winflexbison using Chocolatey:

PS$> choco install -y winflexbison3

Chocolatey ensures win_flex.exe is on your path.

	Make sure everything works
	It’s a good idea to make sure Wireshark compiles and runs at least once before you start hacking the Wireshark sources for your own project. This example uses Git Extensions but any other Git client should work as well.

Download sources Download Wireshark sources into C:\Development\wireshark using either the command line or Git Extensions:

Using the command line:

>cd C:\Development
>git clone https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark.git

Using Git extensions:

From the Start Menu (or Start Screen), navigate to the “Visual Studio 2019” folder and choose the Command Prompt appropriate for the build you wish to make, e.g. “x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019” for a 64-bit version or “x86 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019” for a 32-bit version. Depending on your version of Windows the Command Prompt list might be directly under “Visual Studio 2019” or you might have to dig for it under multiple folders, e.g. Visual Studio 2019 → Visual Studio Tools → Windows Desktop Command Prompts.

You can set up a build environment in your own command prompt by running the appropriate vcvarsARCHITECTURE.bat command. See Use the Microsoft C++ toolset from the command line for details.

	Pin the items to the Task Bar
	Pin the Command Prompt you use to the Task Bar for easy access.

All subsequent operations take place in this Command Prompt window.

CMake is used to process the CMakeLists.txt files in the source tree and produce build files appropriate for your system.

You can generate Visual Studio solution files to build either from within Visual Studio, or from the command line with MSBuild. CMake can also generate other build types but they aren’t supported.

The initial generation step is only required the first time a build directory is created. Subsequent builds will regenerate the build files as required.

If you’ve closed the Visual Studio Command Prompt prepare it again.

To generate the build files enter the following at the Visual Studio command prompt:

> cmake -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -A Win32 ..\wireshark

Adjusting the paths as required to Python and the Wireshark source tree. To use a different generator modify the -G parameter. cmake -G lists all the CMake supported generators, but only Visual Studio is supported for Wireshark builds.

To build an x64 version, specify it as the architecture, e.g. -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -A x64:

> cmake -G "Visual Studio 16 2019" -A x64 ..\wireshark

The CMake generation process will download the required 3rd party libraries (apart from Qt) as required, then test each library for usability before generating the build files.

At the end of the CMake generation process the following should be displayed:

-- Configuring done
-- Generating done
-- Build files have been written to: C:/Development/wsbuild64

If you get any other output, there is an issue in your environment that must be rectified before building. Check the parameters passed to CMake, especially the -G option and the path to the Wireshark sources and the environment variables WIRESHARK_BASE_DIR and QT5_BASE_DIR.

Now it’s time to build Wireshark!

You may also open the Wireshark solution file (Wireshark.sln) in the Visual Studio IDE and build there.

	Tip
	If compilation fails for suspicious reasons after you changed some source files try to clean the build files by running msbuild /m /p:Configuration=RelWithDebInfo Wireshark.sln /t:Clean and then building the solution again.

The build files produced by CMake will regenerate themselves if required by changes in the source tree.

You can debug using the Visual Studio Debugger or WinDbg. See the section on using the Debugger Tools.

To build the Wireshark User’s Guide and the Wireshark Developer’s Guide build the all_guides target, e.g. msbuild all_guides.vcxproj. Detailed information to build these guides can be found in the file docbook\README.adoc in the Wireshark sources.

Note: You should have successfully built Wireshark before doing the following.

If you want to build your own Wireshark-win32-3.5.0-myprotocol123.exe, you’ll need NSIS. You can download it from http://nsis.sourceforge.net.

Note that the 32-bit version of NSIS will work for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Wireshark. NSIS v3 is required.

If you’ve closed the Visual Studio Command Prompt prepare it again.

Run

> msbuild /m /p:Configuration=RelWithDebInfo nsis_package_prep.vcxproj
> msbuild /m /p:Configuration=RelWithDebInfo nsis_package.vcxproj

to build a Wireshark installer. If you sign your executables you should do so between the “nsis_package_prep” and “nsis_package” steps.

Run

> packaging\nsis\wireshark-win64-{wireshark-version}-myprotocol123.exe

to test your new installer. It’s a good idea to test on a different machine than the developer machine. Note that if you’ve built an x86 version, the installer name will contain “win32”.