Creating a Windows Release of Rummikub Solver

This note is about my complete setup for building Rummikub Solver on Windows for Windows.

Rummikub Solver is a Haskell application that depends on external C libraries. As a Unix-native, I found it challenging to figure out a proper way to work with Windows to create a complete package for Windows users. Luckily, the end result is not particularly complex.

This setup shows how to utilize GHCup and MSYS2 to have a working dev environment for compiling Haskell packages. This setup is definitely not best-practice-compliant, but it works in building a portable executable package without smelling too much.

Instructions

Install GHCup. Bundled with GHCup is also an installation of MSYS2. It installs Msys2 in C:\ghcup\msys64.
Open up a Unix-like terminal C:\ghcup\msys64\msys2.exe. You’ll use the terminal to do the rest of the work.
Refresh Msys2’s package manager cache and install dev tools and Rummikub Solver’s dependencies:

pacman -Sy
pacman -S git zip
# Rummikub Solver depends on GLPK.
# This installs the files into `/mingw64/{bin,include,lib}`
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-glpk

Fetch and build Rummikub Solver:

git clone https://github.com/gregorias/rummikubsolver
cd rummikubsolver
# Normally, we'd add C:\ghcup\bin to PATH.
# Couldn't be bothered to do this for my Windows setup though.
/c/ghcup/bin/stack.exe build
# In the background, either Msys or GHCup have added
# "--extra-include-dirs=/mingw64/include --extra-lib-dirs=/mingw64/lib"
# I have researched how it was it done, but FYI,
# that's how Stack knew where to find GLPK.

Create a release package:

# There's a bunch of DLLs the binary depends,
# that are only in mingw on that the user will need as well.
# You can find them via ldd.exe rummikubsolver.exe.
# We're packaging them into the .zip
#
# One way to avoid this would have been to build with static linking, but
# I couldn't figure out how to do this.
zip -r rummikubsolver-win64.zip \
  resources \
  .stack-work/install/xxx/bin/rummikubsolver.exe \
  /mingw64/libgcc_s_seh-1.dll \
  /mingw64/libglpk-40.dll \
  /mingw64/libgmp-10.dll \
  /mingw64/libwinpthread-1.dll

Voilà. You can now upload the zip archive for users to download and use.