Building Lantern¶

Now that all prerequisites have been met, we can start to build Lantern!

Fetch the Lantern repository¶

Launch a MinGW64 shell, which you can find at C:\msys64\mingw64.exe, if you haven’t yet.
Change directory to the Lantern directory:
```
cd $HOME/Lantern
```

Download the Lantern repository from Github.com:

git clone https://github.com/getlantern/lantern.git

Build Lantern¶

Change directory to lantern:
```
cd lantern
```
Build lantern:
```
HEADLESS=true make clean-desktop lantern
```
Note

The standard way of building Lantern is make clean-desktop lantern without the preceding HEADLESS=true. However, after doing this, I got a error:
```
panic: Failed to load C:\Users\user0\AppData\Roaming\systray\systray.dll: %1 is not a valid Win32 application.
```
I suspect this to be a Lantern’s bug, which I cannot fix without modifying the source code, so I had to use this workaround. Lantern built with the HEADLESS flag won’t be able to place its icon in the notification area, but would function normally except this.
Note

If you run make clean-desktop windows instead of HEADLESS=true make lantern, the resulting executable file (it’s named lantern_windows_386.exe instead of lantern) would be presumably runable even on 32-bit Windws systems.
Copy the generated executable file to your desktop:
```
cp lantern /c/User/user0/Desktop/lantern.exe
```
Note

If you did make clean-desktop windows, run the following command instead:
```
cp lantern_windows_386.exe /c/User/user0/Desktop/lantern.exe
```
Now you can find the lantern.exe on your desktop. Run it and profit!