MSYS2 is a collection of tools and libraries providing you with aneasy-to-use environment for building, installing and running native Windowssoftware.

It consists of a command line terminal calledmintty, bash, version control systems like git andsubversion, tools like tar and awk and even build systems like autotools, allbased on a modified version ofCygwin. Despite some ofthese central parts being based on Cygwin, the main focus of MSYS2 is to providea build environment for native Windows software and the Cygwin-using parts arekept at a minimum. MSYS2 provides up-to-date native builds for GCC, mingw-w64,CPython, CMake, Meson, OpenSSL, FFmpeg, Rust, Ruby, just to name a few.

To provide easy installation of packages and a way to keep them updated itfeatures a package management system calledPacman, which should be familiarto Arch Linux users. It brings many powerful features such as dependencyresolution and simple complete system upgrades, as well as straight-forward andreproducible package building. Our package repository containsmore than 3500pre-built packages ready to install.

For more details see'What is MSYS2?' which alsocompares MSYS2 to other software distributions and development environments likeCygwin,WSL,Chocolatey,Scoop, ... and'WhoIs Using MSYS2?' to see which projects are usingMSYS2 and what for.

Installation

1. Download the installer:

   msys2-x86_64-20250830.exe or msys2-arm64-20250830.exe (ARM64)

   (Optional) For more information on the installer, like command line options, or how to verify the checksum and signature of the installer, see theinstaller guide.

2. Run the installer. Installing MSYS2 requires 64 bit Windows 10 or newer.

3. Enter your desiredInstallation Folder (short ASCII-only path on a NTFS volume, no accents, no spaces, no symlinks, no subst or network drives, no FAT).

   

4. When done, clickFinish.

   

5. Now MSYS2 is ready for you and a terminal for theUCRT64 environment will launch.

   

6. You will probably want to install some tools like the mingw-w64 GCC to start compiling projects. Run the following command:

   $pacman-Smingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc

7. The terminal window will show the output as below. Press 'Enter' to continue:

   resolving dependencies...looking for conflicting packages...Packages (15) mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-binutils-2.41-2            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-crt-git-11.0.0.r216.gffe883434-1            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc-libs-13.2.0-2  mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gmp-6.3.0-2            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-headers-git-11.0.0.r216.gffe883434-1            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-isl-0.26-1  mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libiconv-1.17-3            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libwinpthread-git-11.0.0.r216.gffe883434-1            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-mpc-1.3.1-2  mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-mpfr-4.2.1-2            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-windows-default-manifest-6.4-4            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-winpthreads-git-11.0.0.r216.gffe883434-1            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-zlib-1.3-1  mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-zstd-1.5.5-1            mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc-13.2.0-2Total Download Size:    49.38 MiBTotal Installed Size:  418.82 MiB:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n][... downloading and installation continues ...]

8. Now you can callgcc to build software for Windows.

   $gcc--versiongcc.exe (Rev2, Built by MSYS2 project) 13.2.0

9. After installing MSYS2 it will update itself viapacman, see theupdate guide for more information.

Sponsors

Our main server is sponsored byjsDelivr

Various organizations provide us with mirrors all around the world, seeour mirror list for details.

Authors and Contributors

• Alexpux (Alexey Pavlov)
• martell (Martell Malone)
• mingwandroid (Ray Donnelly)
• Elieux (David Macek)
• lazka (Christoph Reiter)
• Renato Silva
• niXman
• naveen521kk (Naveen M K)
• Biswa96 (Biswapriyo Nath)
• jeremyd2019 (Jeremy Drake)
• mati865 (Mateusz Mikuła)
• MehdiChinoune (مهدي شينون / Mehdi Chinoune)
• ognevny (Maksim Bondarenkov)
• striezel (Dirk Stolle)

Donations

You can donate to the project viaGitHub Sponsors:

or viaOpen Collective: