Make sure package mingw-w64-x86_64-gtk4 is installed. Build your project
with a custom prefix (e.g. ~/my-gtk-app-prefix). Navigate to this directory
such that you have subdirectories 'bin', 'lib', 'share', etc containing
the executable to distribute.
If you want to compile with Adwaita, please check if the package mingw-w64-x86_64-libadwaita is installed. 😉
The following command copies all dependent DLLs to the current directory:
$ ldd ./bin/mygtkapp.exe | grep '\/mingw.*\.dll' -o | xargs -I{} cp "{}" ./binWhere mygtkapp.exe is the executable in question (e.g. gtk3-demo, etc). This
ensures that the necessary DLLs are bundled in the application folder so the end
user does not need their own installation of msys2.
All credit to: https://stackoverflow.com/a/50130668
GTK will crash if it cannot load images. GdkPixbuf needs various loaders for different image formats. Your prebuilt loaders will suffice.
Copy them over to the custom prefix directory:
cp -r /mingw64/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0 ./bin/lib/gdk-pixbuf-2.0We then need to copy over the Adwaita and hicolor icon themes, otherwise GTK will display a fallback 'missing icon' symbol.
$ cp -r /mingw64/share/icons/* ./bin/share/icons/The relevant settings schemas need to be installed. Copy them over and recompile. You may want to manually inspect the copied over schemas (in case unrelated projects are also copied).
$ cp /mingw64/share/glib-2.0/schemas/* ./bin/share/glib-2.0/schemas/
$ glib-compile-schemas.exe ./bin/share/glib-2.0/schemas/