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Install-MMGen-on-Microsoft-Windows.md

Install-MMGen-on-Microsoft-Windows.md 14 KB
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Introduction

MMGen is supported on Microsoft Windows via MSYS2, which provides a Unix-like command-line environment within Windows. Windows 7 and later versions are supported.

MSYS2 is the successor project to MinGW-64 and the earlier MSYS, bringing many improvements such as package management and support for Python 3. The MSYS2 project page is located here and its wiki here.

Note: an older version of MMGen can be run under MinGW-64 and MSYS, but its use is deprecated. Installation instructions for MMGen under MinGW-64 and MSYS are archived here for historical interest only.

Before you get started, just a reminder that MMGen must be installed on two computers, one online and one offline, if you want to use it securely. All operations involving private data—wallet generation, address generation and transaction signing—are handled offline, while the online installation takes care of tracking balances and creating and sending transactions.

This means that once you’ve finished the install process, the computer you’ve designated for offline use must be taken offline permanently. Furthermore, its wi-fi and bluetooth interfaces should be disabled as well to safeguard against the possibility of private data leakage.

With some extra steps, it’s possible to perform the installation on a machine that’s already offline. These steps will be additionally outlined in sections entitled “Offline users”. When doing an online install you may skip over these sections.

1. Install MSYS2

Download the MSYS2 executable installer for your architecture from the MSYS2 homepage, but ignore the installation instructions there.

Run the installer, accepting all defaults. At the end of the installation, uncheck “Run MSYS2 now” and click Finish.

2. Set up PowerShell as your MSYS2 terminal

MMGen is incompatible with the terminal provided by the MSYS2 project. However, it works just fine with Windows’ native PowerShell.

Drag or copy a PowerShell icon to the desktop, rename it to “MSYS2”, then right click the icon and select Properties. After the existing path in the Target text window, append a space followed by the text C:\\msys64\usr\bin\bash.exe --login

Save your changes and double click the icon to launch your MSYS2-enabled PowerShell. From now on, all your work will be done in this terminal.

Note that the root of your MSYS2 installation is located in C:\\msys64, so the following commands, for example:

    $ ls /etc              # the path as seen within MSYS2
    $ ls 'C:\\msys64\etc'  # the path as seen by Windows

will produce a listing of the same directory.

3. Upgrade MSYS2

Online users:

Optionally download and edit your mirror lists as described in Offline users below.

Update the package database and core system packages:

    $ pacman -Syu

Exit and restart the terminal. If you’re using custom mirror lists, they were overwritten by the update operation, so you must restore them from your modified versions.

Now complete updating the packages:

    $ pacman -Su

Offline users:

You must now download the required database and package files from the Internet on your online computer and copy them to your offline box. A USB flash drive works ideally for this.

The mirror list files located in the directory /etc/pacman.d specify the servers to download packages from.

The server that’s listed first in these files is the one that will used by default, so you may wish to edit them and place the server you wish to use first in the list. For this you may use a text editor such as Notepad:

    $ notepad /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.msys
    ... repeat for remaining mirrorlist files ...

You need to update your database files as well. The database files and their associated signature files can be listed by issuing the following command:

    $ ls /var/lib/pacman/sync

Download up-to-date versions of these files from the MSYS2 project site:

https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/msys2/REPOS/MSYS2/x86_64/msys.db
https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/msys2/REPOS/MSYS2/x86_64/msys.db.sig
https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/msys2/REPOS/MINGW/x86_64/mingw64.db
https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/msys2/REPOS/MINGW/x86_64/mingw64.db.sig
https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/msys2/REPOS/MINGW/i686/mingw32.db
https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/msys2/REPOS/MINGW/i686/mingw32.db.sig https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/msys2/REPOS/MINGW/clang64/clang64.db https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/msys2/REPOS/MINGW/clang64/clang64.db.sig https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/msys2/REPOS/MINGW/ucrt64/ucrt64.db https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/msys2/REPOS/MINGW/ucrt64/ucrt64.db.sig

Copy the files to your offline machine as you did with the mirror files, replacing the originals at C:\msys64\var\lib\pacman\sync.

Now issue the following command:

    $ pacman -Sup > urls.txt

This command may cause your MSYS terminal window to close. If so, simply reopen another one.

The command's output is now saved in the file urls.txt (this redirection trick using '>' works for most shell commands, by the way). Copy urls.txt to your online machine and download the URLs listed in it. Transfer the downloaded files to your offline machine, copying them to the package cache directory C:\msys64\var\cache\pacman\pkg.

Now issue the following command to perform the initial upgrade:

    $ pacman -Su

When the process is finished, close your terminal window as requested and reopen another one. If any mirror lists have have been added by the upgrade operation, you may wish to edit them as you did above.

Now reissue the pacman -Sup command, which will generate a much longer list of URLs this time. Download the listed files on your online machine. Create a new folder on your offline machine:

    $ mkdir packages1

Copy the downloaded package files to this folder and execute the following command to install them:

    $ (cd packages1; pacman -U *)

Your system upgrade is now complete.

4. Install MSYS2 MMGen dependencies

Now that your system’s fully up to date, you’re ready to install the packages specifically required by MMGen.

Offline users:

The command pacman -S <pgknames> installs the requested MSYS2 packages, while pacman -Sp <pgknames> prints a list of download URLs for the packages and their dependencies. So before running the command shown below, you’ll first need to issue it with -Sp instead of -S to produce a URL list. Download these URLs on your online machine and copy and install the downloaded files to the your offline machine just as you did in the previous step, substituting packages2 for packages1 in both commands.

Install the packages and their dependencies:

$ pacman -S tar git vim autoconf automake-wrapper autogen \
    mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-libtool \
    mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-pcre \
    mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-make \
    mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-python3-cryptography \
    mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-python3-six \
    mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-python3-pexpect \
    mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-python3-gmpy2 \
    mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-libsodium \
    mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-python3-pynacl \
    mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-python3-pip \
    mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc

5. Set up your environment

Create the /usr/local/bin directory. This is where you’ll place various binaries required by MMGen:

$ mkdir -p /usr/local/bin  # seen by Windows as C:\\msys64\usr\local\bin

Open your shell’s runtime configuration file in a text editor:

$ notepad ~/.bashrc

Add the following two lines to the end of the file (if this is a Bitcoin-only installation, you may omit the Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash Node components of the path):

export PATH="/mingw64/bin:$PATH:/c/Program Files/Bitcoin/daemon:/c/Program Files/Litecoin/daemon:/c/Program Files/Bitcoin-Cash-Node/daemon"
export PYTHONUTF8=1

Save and exit. Close and reopen the terminal window to update your working environment.

6. Install MMGen dependencies not provided by MSYS2

Four of MMGen’s Python dependencies, ecdsa, py_ecc, mypy_extensions and socks, are not provided by MSYS2. If you’re online, you can install them using the pip package installer as follows:

$ pip3 install --no-deps ecdsa==0.13 py_ecc==1.6.0 mypy_extensions==0.4.1 socks

For an offline install, first download the packages on your online machine like this:

$ pip3 download --no-deps ecdsa==0.13 py_ecc==1.6.0 mypy_extensions==0.4.1 socks

Then transfer the downloaded files to your offline machine, cd to the directory containing the files and install them as follows:

$ pip3 install --no-deps *.whl
$ tar zxvf socks-0.tar.gz
$ (cd socks-0; python3 setup.py install)

7. Install the standalone scrypt package (required for strong password hashing)

Thanks to a faulty implementation of the scrypt function included in Python’s hashlib, the standalone scrypt module is required for stronger-than-default password hashing, i.e. hash presets greater than 3. Installing the package is therefore highly recommended.

On your online machine, download the tar archive:

$ pip3 download --no-deps scrypt==0.8.13

On your offline machine, unpack and enter the archive:

$ tar fax scrypt-0.8.13.tar.gz
$ cd scrypt-0.8.13

Open the file setup.py in your text editor. Right before the line beginning with:

scrypt_module = Extension(

add the following line (with no indentation):

includes = ['/mingw64/include']

Also change the line:

libraries = ['libcrypto_static']

to read:

libraries = ['libcrypto']

Save the file and exit the editor. Now build and install:

$ python3 setup.py build --compiler=mingw32
$ python3 setup.py install

8. Install the secp256k1 library

On your online machine, clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1.git

If you’re doing an offline install, copy the cloned secp256k1 directory to your offline machine.

Enter the directory, configure, build and install:

$ cd secp256k1
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --disable-dependency-tracking
$ mingw32-make.exe install MAKE=mingw32-make LIBTOOL=$(which libtool)

9. Install MMGen

Now you’re ready to install MMGen itself. On your online machine, clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/mmgen/mmgen
Cloning into ’mmgen’...

If you’re doing an offline install, you can then copy the cloned mmgen directory to your offline machine.

Enter the directory and install:

$ cd mmgen
$ git checkout stable_msys2 # See 'Note' below
$ ./setup.py install

Note: if you want to use features that have appeared since the latest stable_msys2 release, then you can omit the git checkout step and remain on the master branch. Please bear in mind, however, that security vulnerabilities are more likely to be present in new code than in a stable release. In addition, while the tip of master is always tested on Linux before being pushed to the public repository, it’s not guaranteed to install or run on MSYS2. Installation or runtime issues may also arise due to missing dependencies or installation steps not yet covered in the documentation.

10. Install and launch your coin daemons

At this point your MMGen installation will be able to generate wallets, along with keys and addresses for all supported coins. However, if you intend to do any transacting, as you probably do, you’ll need to install and launch a coin daemon or daemons. MMGen has full transaction support for BTC, BCH, LTC, ETH, ETC and ERC20 tokens.

Go to the Install Bitcoind and other supported coin daemons wiki page and follow the instructions for your coins of choice. You can skip the parts about adding to the Windows path, since your PATH variable was taken care of in Step 5. Note that the daemons must be installed on both your online and offline machines.

To transact ETH, ETC or ERC20 tokens you’ll need the latest OpenEthereum binary build for Windows from the OpenEthereum Github repository. OpenEthereum, unlike the other coin daemons, is installed on the online machine only. Copy the openethereum.exe and ethkey.exe binaries to /usr/local/bin. Please note that OpenEthereum performs very poorly under Windows due to threading limitations. Unless you have very fast hardware, transacting and syncing the blockchain could be painfully slow.

Typically you’ll wish to launch OpenEthereum as follows:

$ openethereum.exe --jsonrpc-apis=all

More information on OpenEthereum’s command-line options can be found here.

11. You’re done!

Congratulations, your installation is now complete, and you can proceed to Getting Started with MMGen. Note that all features supported by MMGen on Linux, except for autosigning, are now supported on MSYS2 too. Please be aware of the following, however:

  • Non-ASCII filenames cannot be used with the Monero wallet syncing tool. This is an issue with the Monero wallet RPC daemon rather than MMGen.

  • The Bitcoin Cash Node daemon cannot handle non-ASCII pathnames. This is an issue with the Bitcoin Cash Node implementation for Windows, not MMGen.