How to build ugrep with Microsoft Visual Studio

The following instructions apply to MSVC++ 2019 or greater.

Base-UGREP

• Double-click on ugrep.sln to open in Visual Studio 2019 or later.
• You may be asked to upgrade the projects to the version of Visual Studio that you have installed.
• Once the project is open, select the desired platform (x86 or x64), select the desired configuration (Base-Debug or Base-Release).
  • Note that the Pcre-Debug and Pcre-Release configurations will not build without additional steps as described below.
• Build Solution.

The resulting binary will be in ...\ugrep\msvc\bin\Base-(configuration)\ugrep.exe.

Pcre-UGREP

To add support for PCRE2 regular expressions (use PCRE2 for the -P option) and for searching within compressed files, you’ll need to download and extract additional sources for the required external libraries. For each library described below, you’ll need to download the library, extract it, rename the library folder to remove the library version number, and move the library folder next to the ugrep folder.

For example, if my ugrep source code is in D:\sources\ugrep, I would download pcre2-10.39.tar.bz2, use tar xf pcre2-10.39.tar.bz2 to extract it (creating a folder named pcre2-10.39), then I would run move pcre2-10.39 D:\sources\pcre2 to move and rename the folder.

• Download PCRE2 from GitHub, e.g. pcre2-10.39.tar.gz. Extract, then rename folder to pcre2.
• Download ZLIB from zlib.net, e.g. zlib-1.2.11.tar.gz. Extract, then rename folder to zlib.
• Download BZIP2 from sourceware.org, e.g. bzip2-1.0.8.tar.gz. Extract, then rename folder to bzip2.
• Download XZ Utils from SourceForge, e.g. xz-5.2.5.tar.gz. Extract, then rename folder to xz.
• Download LZ4 from GitHub, e.g. lz4-1.9.3.tar.gz. Extract, then rename folder to lz4.
• Download ZSTD from GitHub, e.g. zstd-1.5.0.tar.gz. Extract, then rename folder to zstd.

You should now be able to build the Pcre-Debug and Pcre-Release configurations. The resulting binary will be in ...\ugrep\msvc\bin\Pcre-(configuration)\ugrep.exe.

Boost-UGREP

To add support for Boost regular expressions (use Boost-RegEx for the -P option) and for searching within compressed files, you’ll need to follow the instructions for Pcre-UGREP and then use the following steps to enable Boost.

• Download Boost, e.g. boost_1_77_0.tar.gz. Extract this next to your ugrep directory, then rename folder to boost.
• Open the “Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio” from the Start menu.
• CD to the boost directory.
• Run bootstrap vcNNN, where NNN corresponds to the toolset version being used to build your ugrep project. To determine this value, open ugrep.sln, go to properties of the ugrep project, look under Configuration Properties/General, and check the value of Platform Toolset. For example, if Platform Toolset is “Visual Studio 2019 (v142)”, I would run bootstrap vc142.
• Build 32-bit and 64-bit libs with the following commands, replacing msvc-14.2 with your toolset version as appropriate.
  • b2 -a toolset=msvc-14.2 address-model=32 architecture=x86 runtime-link=static variant=release link=static threading=multi --with-regex
  • b2 -a toolset=msvc-14.2 address-model=64 architecture=x86 runtime-link=static variant=release link=static threading=multi --with-regex

You should now be able to build the Boost-Debug and Boost-Release configurations. The resulting binary will be in ...\ugrep\msvc\bin\Boost-(configuration)\ugrep.exe.