CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cwindowsgccdllmingw-w64
Red Star
Red Star

Reputation: 265

How to ship .dll files with the .exe file

I have an application that depends on some .dll files. I know if I just make them in the same folder as the .exe file, it would work, but I don't want to leave 30 .dll files with my .exe file. Is there a way I can put them in a folder with my .exe file ?

Or even better, is it possible to compile them and link them with the .exe file to have a standalone file? And no I don't have the static version of these dynamic libraries.

(p.s. the application is written with c, compiled with gcc, mingw win64, and the .dll are from gtk3 libs)

Thank you for reading my question

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2423

Answers (2)

DharmendraSankhla
DharmendraSankhla

Reputation: 94

Let's make is simple
download winrar from
www.rarlab.com/download.htm
A) create standalone winrar executable pack your file in archive and execute your main program.
no idea how to create standalone installer guide for you

http://www.groovypost.com/howto/howto/how-to-make-your-own-offline-installers-using-winrar/

Upvotes: 0

Angus Comber
Angus Comber

Reputation: 9708

You have a number of options.

A) get hold of the library files, .lib on windows and statically link with these libraries.

B) It is a bit of a hack but you can attach resources into a Windows executable. This is usually used for strings, icons, that sort of thing, but you could even attach in a binary file. But if you do this you would probably need to generate the dll binaries at program startup and save to eg same folder as your executable. So no point in doing this really, simply distribute in the same folder as your exe. What is the problem doing that? (lookup LoadResource, FindResource, MAKEINTRESOURCE, etc)

C) If you don't want to put the dlls is the same path as your exe you will need to store them in a folder in your system's path env variable. Eg you could copy them to C:\Windows - but due to security that will be harder. You could create your own dll_path and add this path to the env variable as part of the installation of your program.

D) One other variation on C) is that you copy to for example a subdirectory of you exe location, called eg dll_files. Then you use a startup script to launch your program like this:

@echo off
set PATH=%PATH%;<path to dll files>
myprogram.exe

Upvotes: 1

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