Theos

A cross-platform build system for creating iOS, macOS, Linux, and Windows programs.

Installation instructions for Cygwin (Deprecated)

This guide will help you install Theos on your Windows machine via Cygwin.

Platform Minimum OS version Targets supported
Windows XP Windows (via Cygwin), iOS

Cygwin support is deprecated. The latest toolchain releases for Cygwin are several years out of date. You will have a much better experience by using Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Please note that the latest toolchain provided for Cygwin only supports iOS SDKs earlier than iOS 11. For 32-bit installations of Cygwin, this is more severely limited to iOS SDKs earlier than iOS 8, and lacks support for building arm64 binaries.

All the commands shown in the following instructions are meant to be run as a normal user, not root. Similarly, Theos is also meant to be run as a normal user, not root.

  1. Install the following prerequisites:

    • Cygwin
    • git (under Devel)
    • make (under Devel)
    • ca-certificates (under Net)
    • openssh (under Net)
    • perl (under Perl)
    • python (under Python)
  2. Set up the THEOS environment variable:

     echo "export THEOS=~/theos" >> ~/.profile
    

    For this change to take effect, you must restart your shell. Open a new tab and do echo $THEOS on your shell to check if this is working.

  3. Clone Theos to your device:

     git clone --recursive https://github.com/theos/theos.git $THEOS
    
  4. Get the toolchain:

    On 32-bit:

     git clone https://github.com/coolstar/iOSToolchain4Win.git $THEOS/toolchain/windows/iphone
    

    On 64-bit:

     git clone -b x86_64 https://github.com/coolstar/iOSToolchain4Win.git $THEOS/toolchain/windows/iphone
    
  5. Get an iOS SDK:

    You can get patched SDKs from our SDKs repo.

     curl -LO https://github.com/theos/sdks/archive/master.zip
     TMP=$(mktemp -d)
     unzip master.zip -d $TMP
     mv $TMP/sdks-master/*.sdk $THEOS/sdks
     rm -r master.zip $TMP