Make isn’t available in Windows. When downloading a Windows application we download a setup file of EXE format. There’s no telling what these setup files may contain. You may even be downloading malware with exe format. Below we have compiled a few different approaches to installing Make in Windows.
What is Make?
GNU.org tells Make is a tool that controls the generation of programs from its source files. In simple terms, the Make tool takes the source code of the application as input and produces the application as output. Make is targeted for applications that follow the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) principle. It was originally designed to work across Linux systems only. The source code can be modified in any way we want before we package it up for use.
Installing Make on Windows
Using Winget
Winget tool by Windows manages installation and upgrade of application packages in Windows 10 and 11. To use this tool, you need to have at least Windows 10 or later installed on your PC.
Using Chocolatey
Using Chocolatey is a great way to install make if you do not meet the minimum requirements for Winget. It is a package manager and installer for the Windows platform. For anyone familiar with Ubuntu, it is the equivalent of apt command for software installation. Since Make is not directly available in Windows, we need to install the package manager first. Then, we will use this package manager to install the make tool.
Using WSL
Using WSL or Windows Subsystem for Linux, we can install Make directly on our PC. WSL is released by Windows so this is the most preferred way of installing Make on Windows. For WSL, we will install Ubuntu inside our Windows.
Using MinGW
MinGW is one of the older ways to install Make on Windows. MinGW is a collection of minimal GNU files for Windows. Note that using this method, you will have to type the ming32-make instead of the make command. Both do the same work except ming32-make is the MinGW version of make.
How to use Make on Windows?
Using Make on Windows is pretty much the same as Linux or other platforms. You need to start with a makefile along with the source code of the program. If you want to learn more about using the Make command, there’s entire documentation on its usage.
