How to compile MONICA (Windows)

Windows

Required Software

• VisualStudio 2022 (community edition) with Language package English (If you don’t want to run Visual Studio as editor, install Visual Studio Build Tools instead)

• cmake 3.28 or newer

• git

Environment Variables

make sure environment variables are set, usually this is done during installation of the program 'Path' should contain the executable paths to:

• git (2.13 or higher) (e.g. C:\Program Files\Git\cmd)

• cmake (e.g. C:\Program Files\CMake\bin)

• (optional) msbuild -if using the VS Build Tools

Note: Don’t forget to install the English language package for Visual Studio(or Visual Studio Build Tools)

Steps (Windows 10 using PowerShell)

• create and switch to your working folder e.g 'c:\zalf-rpm'

  mkdir c:\zalf-rpm
  cd c:\zalf-rpm

• checkout monica and related repositories with git

  git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/zalf-rpm/monica.git
  git clone https://github.com/zalf-rpm/monica-parameters.git

• checkout vcpkg for dependent libs, but use the tagged version found in the vcpkg_tag.txt file in the root of the MONICA repository

  git clone -b 2025.10.17 https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git

• build vcpkg

  cd vcpkg
  .\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
  .\vcpkg install zeromq:x64-windows-static
  .\vcpkg install capnproto:x64-windows-static
  .\vcpkg install libsodium:x64-windows-static
  .\vcpkg install tomlplusplus:x64-windows-static

Your folder structure should look like that:

working folder (e.g. 'c:\zalf-rpm')
          |_ monica
          |_ monica-parameters
          |_ vcpkg

• create a visual studio solution by using cmake change to monica in your working folder (e.g. 'c:\zalf-rpm')

  cd c:\zalf-rpm\monica

• create_solution_x64_VS17_2022.cmd to build

  .\create_solution_x64_VS17_2022.cmd

• change to the newly created _cmake_win64 open monica.sln with visual studio and compile

• (optional) or run msbuild msbuild _cmake_win64/monica.sln /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform="x64"

Creating an installer-file for Windows

Prerequesites

• MONICA should be built as Release using Visual Studio (s. above)