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. 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, Python, etc are also required, but can be installed
rem via their respective installation packages.
choco install -y git cmake python3

Download and install “Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition”. If you prefer you can instead download and install “Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition”. The examples below are for Visual Studio 2022 but can be adapted for Visual Studio 2019. These are small utilities that download 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

(unless you want to use them for purposes other than Wireshark).

You can alternatively use Chocolatey to install Visual Studio, using the Visual Studio Community and Native Desktop workload packages. Note that this includes Visual Studio’s CMake component.

choco install -y visualstudio2022community visualstudio2022-workload-nativedesktop

You can use other Microsoft C compiler variants, but VS2022 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 2022 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, select “Custom installation“ on the “Installation Folder“ of the installer screen (do not select “Qt 6.4 for desktop development“) and, on the “Select Components“ screen of the installer, 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 6.2.4 “msvc2019 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.

Qt 6 needs the "Qt 5 Compatibility Module" to be installed as well. Additionally, the module "Qt Multimedia" may be installed, to support advanced controls for playing back streams in the RTP Player dialog.

The CMake variable CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH (see https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/cmake-get-started.html) should be set as appropriate for your environment and should point to the Qt installation directory, e.g. C:\Qt\6.2.4\msvc2019_64 Alternatively you can also use the environment variable WIRESHARK_QT6_PREFIX_PATH.

Qt 6 is the default option for building Wireshark, but Wireshark has support for Qt 5.12 and later. To enable Wireshark to build with Qt 5 pass -DUSE_qt6=OFF to cmake.

Get a Python 3 installer from https://python.org/download/ and install Python. Its installation location varies depending on the options selected in the installer and on the version of Python that you are installing. At the time of this writing the latest version of Python is 3.10, and common installation directories are C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310, C:\Program Files\Python310, and C:\Python310.

Alternatively you can install Python using Chocolatey:

choco install -y python3

Chocolatey will likely install Python in one of the locations above, or possibly in C:\Tools\Python3.

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).

choco install -y git

While CMake is required to build Wireshark, it might have been installed as a component of either Visual Studio or Qt. If that’s the case you can skip this step. If you do want or need to install CMake, you can get it from https://cmake.org/download/. Installing CMake into the default location is recommended. Ensure the directory containing cmake.exe is added to your path.

Alternatively you can install it using Chocolatey:

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). The JavaScript flavor (Asciidoctor.js) isn’t yet supported. It is used in conjunction with Xsltproc and DocBook to generate the documentation you’re reading and the User’s Guide.

You can install AsciidoctorJ, Xsltproc, and DocBook using Chocolatey. AsciidoctorJ requires a Java runtime and there are many to choose from. Chocolatey doesn’t support alternative package dependencies at the present time, including dependencies on Java. As a result, installing the asciidoctorj package won’t automatically install a Java runtime — you must install one separately.

choco install -y <your favorite Java runtime>
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 is on your path.

Alternatively you can install Winflexbison using Chocolatey:

choco install -y winflexbison3

Chocolatey ensures win_flex.exe is on your path.

If needed you can 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:

choco install -y strawberryperl
# ...or...
choco install -y activeperl

	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 2022” folder and choose the Command Prompt appropriate for the build you wish to make, e.g. “x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2022” for a 64-bit version. Depending on your version of Windows the Command Prompt list might be directly under “Visual Studio 2022” or you might have to dig for it under multiple folders, e.g. Visual Studio 2022 → 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 17 2022" -A x64 ..\wireshark

Adjusting the path to the Wireshark source tree as required. 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. 32-bit builds are no longer supported.

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 CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH.

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-4.1.0-myprotocol123-x64.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 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Wireshark. NSIS version 3 is required.

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

msbuild /m /p:Configuration=RelWithDebInfo wireshark_nsis_prep.vcxproj
msbuild /m /p:Configuration=RelWithDebInfo wireshark_nsis.vcxproj

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

Run

packaging\nsis\wireshark-{wireshark-version}-myprotocol123-x64.exe

to test your new installer. It’s a good idea to test on a different machine than the developer machine.