Installing OpenFHE on Windows

The preferred way of building OpenFHE in Windows is using MinGW64. VC++ is no longer supported.

Download and install MSYS2 using default settings. Start the MSYS2 MINGW 64-bit shell and execute the following command

pacman -Syu

to update all packages (you may need to run it twice as it often fails the first time; just reopen the console and reenter the command. This may also happen for the other installs below).

  1. Run the following commands to install all pre-requisites

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake
pacman -S make
pacman -S git

  1. Clone the repo.

  2. Create a directory where the binaries will be built. The typical choice is a subfolder build. In this case, the commands are:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

Note that cmake will check for any system dependencies that are needed for the build process.

  1. The OpenFHE distribution includes some external libraries, such as GMP and NTL. If you want to use any of these libraries:

    1. install autoconf:

    pacman -S autoconf

    1. enable them when you run cmake to force them to build (see instructions on cmake options).

  2. Build OpenFHE by running the following command (this will take few minutes; using the -j <threads> make command-line flag is suggested to speed up the build where threads is typically the number of cores or threads on your machine)

make

  1. Install OpenFHE in a system directory (if desired or for production purposes)

make install

You need to run MinGW64 as an administrator unless you are specifying some other install location. You can change the install location by running cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/your/path ..

To run MinGW64 as an administrator, open Task Manager, go to File -> Run New Task, select the location of the executable for MinGW64, and check the box “Create this task with administrative privileges”.

  1. Add the following paths to the PATH variable (to find the dlls): lib (no NTL) or lib:third-party/bin (with NTL). For example, the following commands can be used

Without NTL:

export PATH=$PATH:lib

With NTL:

export PATH=$PATH:lib:{PATH_TO_NTL_BINARIES}

Alternatively, add the path(s) to ORIGINAL_PATH variable in c:/msys64/etc/profile to make this change permanent.

Testing and cleaning the build

Run unit tests to make sure all capabilities operate as expected

make testall

Run sample code to test, e.g.,

bin/examples/pke/simple-integers

To remove the files built by make, you can execute

make clean