Saturday, December 13, 2025

How to build KMER-DB on a Windows PC

After having a lot of difficulty compiling KMER-DB for windows, I have finally succeeded in getting it to compile on a Windows machine.

I started by downloading the latest release from : https://github.com/refresh-bio/kmer-db/releases




You can also obtain it from : https://github.com/refresh-bio/kmer-db

I then unzipped it and found that there was a Visual Studio solution file in the src folder:


I am currently using Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition.

But when I tried to compile it I found that it was not building as there was a pre-build step failing.




I then had to download some extra code for other libraries:



I had to download: 

https://github.com/intel/isa-l

https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc

https://github.com/zlib-ng/zlib-ng

https://github.com/netwide-assembler/nasm

And I then put the extracted folder of each's code in the appropriate lib sub folder.


After I did this I also found that I had the ensure the NMAKE.exe utility's path was in my path variables:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.43.34808\bin\Hostx64\x64

And the Resource Compiler RC.exe is in the path as well:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\10.0.22621.0\x64

As well as the compiled NASM.exe , which I compiled here:
C:\Tools\nasm-master
(But I have an idea just having put it in the lib folder and just compiling as part of the Visual Studio pre build step could have worked.)

Anyhow, I compiled it with MINGW64 using the commands:


./autogen.sh

./configure

make

make install


After I had everything in place it built successfully in Visual Studio: