Building Bloxstrap from source
These are instructions for people who want to compile and build the source code for contributing, debugging, etc. If you simply just want to download and install Bloxstrap, see the Installing section in the README. If you're just looking to use a commit that doesn't have a published release, obtain a build artifact from GitHub Actions.
Note that this can only be done on Windows as this uses the .NET Desktop Runtime.
First, download the source repository using either git clone or GitHub Desktop. Don't download it as a ZIP archive as you'll just run into problems without using git.
> git clone https://github.com/pizzaboxer/bloxstrap.git
> cd bloxstrap
> git submodule init
> git submodule update
From there, there's two ways to build the source code. If you don't already have Visual Studio installed, it's recommended to just build with .NET CLI.
Note that these instructions are for building a release binary. Otherwise, you can just use Visual Studio's debugging tools.
Important
Publishing through VS is currently broken on the main branch. It should be fixed on the version-2.6.0-contingency branch. If you're still having problems, open an issue please.
Open Bloxstrap.sln in Visual Studio, right-click the Bloxstrap project in the Solution Explorer, and select 'Publish'. Configure your build options if you need to (though you shouldn't have to change anything), and click 'Publish'.
If you don't have Visual Studio installed, you can just download and install the .NET 6 SDK for this one.
Open a terminal, and set your location to the folder containing Bloxstrap.sln. Then, run the following command:
> dotnet publish /p:PublishProfile=Publish-x64
If you need to configure any build options, run dotnet help publish to learn how to configure options for publishing.
Navigate to the Bloxstrap folder (the one containing Bloxstrap.csproj), where the compiled binaries are located in bin\Release\net6.0-windows\publish. From there, you can either run and install it fresh, or copy it into your Bloxstrap install location.
If you've come this far, you may also want to disable automatic updating for convenience.