Build the AWS SDK for C++ on Windows - AWS SDK for C++

Build the AWS SDK for C++ on Windows

To set up the AWS SDK for C++, you can either build the SDK yourself directly from the source or download the libraries using a package manager.

The SDK source is separated into individual packages by service. Installing the entire SDK can take up to an hour. Installing only the specific subset of services that your program uses decreases installation time and also reduces size on disk. To choose which services to install, you need to know the package name of each service your program uses. You can see the list of package directories at aws/aws-sdk-cpp on GitHub. The package name is the suffix of the directory name for the service.

aws-sdk-cpp\aws-cpp-sdk-<packageName> # Repo directory name and packageName aws-sdk-cpp\aws-cpp-sdk-s3 # Example: Package name is s3

Prerequisites

You need a minimum of 4 GB of RAM to build some of the larger AWS clients. The SDK might fail to build on Amazon EC2 instance types t2.micro, t2.small, and other small instance types due to insufficient memory.

To use the AWS SDK for C++, you need one of the following:

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 or later,

  • GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 4.9 or later, or

  • Clang 3.3 or later.

On Windows, the SDK is built with WinHTTP as the default HTTP client. However, WinHTTP 1.0 does not support HTTP/2 bidirectional streaming, which is required for some AWS services such as Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Lex. Thus, it is sometimes necessary to build curl support with the SDK. To view all available curl download options, see curl Releases and Downloads. One method for building the SDK with curl support is the following:

To build the SDK with curl library support included
  1. Navigate to curl for Windows and download the curl binary package for Microsoft Windows.

  2. Unpack the package to a folder on your computer, for example, C:\curl.

  3. Navigate to CA certificates extracted from Mozilla and download the cacert.pem file. This Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM) file contains a bundle of valid digital certificates that are used to verify the authenticity of secure websites. The certificates are distributed by certificate authority (CA) companies such as GlobalSign and Verisign.

  4. Move the cacert.pem file to the bin subfolder that you unpacked in a previous step, for example, C:\curl\bin. Rename the file as curl-ca-bundle.crt.

Also, the Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild) must be able to locate the curl dll in the procedure that follows. Therefore, you should add the curl bin folder path to your Windows PATH environment variable, for example, set PATH=%PATH%;C:\curl\bin. You must add this each time you open a new command prompt to build the SDK. Alternatively, you can set the environment variable globally in your Windows system settings so that the setting is remembered.

When Building the SDK from source in the procedure that follows, see Step 5 (Generate build files) for required command syntax to build curl into your SDK.

When writing your code, you must set caFile in the AWS Client configuration to the location of your certificate file. For an example using Amazon Transcribe, see transcribe-streaming in the AWS Code Examples Repository on GitHub.

Building the SDK from source

You can build the SDK from source using command-line tools. Using this method, you can customize your SDK build. For information about available options, see CMake Parameters. There are three main steps. First, you build the files using CMake. Second, you use MSBuild to build the SDK binaries that work with your operating system and build toolchain. Third, you install or copy the binaries into the correct location on the development machine.

To build the SDK from source
  1. Install CMake (minimum version 3.13) and the relevant build tools for your platform. It is recommended to add cmake to your PATH. To check your version of CMake, open a command prompt and run command cmake --version

  2. In a command prompt, navigate to a folder where you want to store the SDK.

  3. Get the latest source code.

    Version 1.11 uses git submodules to wrap external dependencies. This includes the CRT libraries described in the AWS SDKs and Tools Reference Guide.

    Download or clone the SDK source from aws/aws-sdk-cpp on GitHub:

    • Clone with Git: HTTPS

      git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-cpp
    • Clone with Git: SSH

      git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:aws/aws-sdk-cpp.git
  4. We recommend you store the generated build files outside of the SDK source directory. Create a new directory to store the build files in and navigate to that folder.

    mkdir sdk_build cd sdk_build
  5. Generate the build files by running cmake. Specify on the cmake command line whether to build a Debug or Release version. Choose Debug throughout this procedure to run a debug configuration of your application code. Choose Release throughout this procedure to run a release configuration of your application code. For Windows, the SDK install location is typically \Program Files (x86)\aws-cpp-sdk-all\. Command syntax:

    {path to cmake if not in PATH} {path to source location of aws-sdk-cpp} -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=[Debug | Release] -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH={path to install destination}

    For more ways to modify the build output, see CMake Parameters.

    To generate the build files, do one of the following:

    • Generate build files (all AWS services): To build the entire SDK, run cmake, specifying whether to build a Debug or Release version. For example:

      cmake "..\aws-sdk-cpp" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="C:\Program Files (x86)\aws-cpp-sdk-all"

    • Generate build files (subset AWS services): To build only a particular service or services package(s) for the SDK, add the CMake BUILD_ONLY parameter, with the service names separated by semicolons. The following example builds only the Amazon S3 service package:

      cmake ..\aws-sdk-cpp -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DBUILD_ONLY="s3" -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="C:\Program Files (x86)\aws-cpp-sdk-all"
    • Generate build files (with curl): After completing the curl prerequisites, three additional cmake command line options are required to include curl support in the SDK: FORCE_CURL, CURL_INCLUDE_DIR, and CURL_LIBRARY. For example:

      cmake ..\aws-sdk-cpp -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DFORCE_CURL=ON -DCURL_INCLUDE_DIR='C:/curl/include' -DCURL_LIBRARY='C:/curl/lib/libcurl.dll.a' -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="C:\Program Files (x86)\aws-cpp-sdk-all"
    Note

    If you get an error Failed to build third-party libraries, check your version of CMake by running cmake --version. You must use CMake minimum version 3.13.

  6. Build the SDK binaries. If you’re building the entire SDK, this step can take one hour or longer. Command syntax:

    {path to cmake if not in PATH} --build . --config=[Debug | Release]

    cmake --build . --config=Debug
    Note

    If you encounter the error The code execution cannot proceed ... dll not found. Reinstalling the program may fix this problem.", retry the cmake command again.

  7. Open a command prompt with administrator privileges to install the SDK in the location specified earlier using the CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH parameter. Command syntax:

    {path to cmake if not in PATH} --install . --config=[Debug | Release]

    cmake --install . --config=Debug

Building for Android on Windows

To build for Android, add -DTARGET_ARCH=ANDROID to your cmake command line. The AWS SDK for C++ includes a CMake toolchain file that includes what you need by referencing the appropriate environment variables (ANDROID_NDK).

To build the SDK for Android on Windows, you need to run cmake from a Visual Studio (2015 or later) developer command prompt. You’ll also need NMAKE NMAKEinstalled and the commands git and patch in your path. If you have git installed on a Windows system, you’ll most likely find patch in a sibling directory (.../Git/usr/bin/). Once you’ve verified these requirements, your cmake command line will change slightly to use NMAKE.

cmake -G "NMake Makefiles" `-DTARGET_ARCH=ANDROID` <other options> ..

NMAKE builds serially. To build more quickly, we recommend you install JOM as an alternative to NMAKE, and then change the cmake invocation as follows:

cmake -G "NMake Makefiles JOM" `-DTARGET_ARCH=ANDROID` <other options> ..

For an example application, see Setting up an Android application with AWS SDK for C++