windows-builds

streamlink/windows-builds

Windows installer and portable archive builds for Streamlink.

Please see Streamlink’s install documentation for more details and different install methods.

The windows-builds changelog can be found here.

Contents

• an embedded Python environment
• Streamlink and its dependencies
• FFmpeg, for muxing streams

Download

Stable releases

Builds of official Streamlink releases.
Download from the releases page.

Preview builds

Built on each push to Streamlink’s master branch.
This includes the most recent changes, but is not considered “stable”.
Download from the build-artifacts of the preview-build runs (requires a GitHub login).

Notes

Installers

• When installing, the bin subdirectory of the installation path gets added to the system’s PATH environment variable, so the streamlink.exe and streamlinkw.exe executables can be resolved without having to specify the absolute or relative path to these files.
• An entry gets added to the system’s list of installed software, and an uninstaller gets generated.
• When installing, the pkgs subdirectory gets deleted recursively before unpacking any files, to ensure that old and unsupported python package files of previous installations don’t exist when upgrading without uninstalling.
• A default config file gets written to %APPDATA%\streamlink\config if it doesn’t exist.
• The ffmpeg-ffmpeg argument in the config file always gets updated to the current install-location.
• Python modules not part of the standard library will be byte-compiled after installation.

Portable archives

• The bin directory with the streamlink.exe and streamlinkw.exe executables won’t be added to the PATH environment variable.
• Since no config file will be generated either, users will need to create one themselves, including the ffmpeg-ffmpeg argument. Otherwise, --ffmpeg-ffmpeg needs to be set on the command line to enable muxed output streams.
• Python modules not part of the standard library will be byte-compiled upon first execution.

Additional notes

Both the embedded Python builds and FFmpeg builds are unofficial and unsigned, as we’re building them ourselves. Due to this circumstance, certain antivirus programs might trigger false positive alerts. The sources, build instructions and build logs can be read and observed in the repositories linked above.

Developer notes

Build requirements

• GNU/Linux environment
• git
• Python 3.9+ and the most recent version of pip
  • virtualenv
  • pynsist ==2.8
  • distlib ==0.3.6
  • freezegun
• NSIS
• jq
• gawk
• Imagemagick
• Inkscape

How to

The build configurations can be found in the config.yml file. Here, the default Streamlink source and version are defined that will be used when building, in addition to assets, and most importantly, the various build flavors.

The installer.cfg file defines the pynsist configuration, and the installer.nsi file is used as an extension for pynsist’s default NSIS template. portable.yml on the other hand defines the configuration for the portable builds.

Each build flavor includes the source of an embedded Python build and the fixed set of Streamlink’s dependency versions plus checksums for that specific build (Streamlink doesn’t provide its own dependency lockfile).

Building the installers and portable archives works by running

./build-installer.sh "${FLAVOR}" "${GITSOURCE}" "${GITREF}"
./build-portable.sh "${FLAVOR}" "${GITSOURCE}" "${GITREF}"

with GITSOURCE and GITREF being optional overrides (e.g. when building from the master branch).
Building the installer and portable archives requires an activated virtual Python environment with all build dependencies installed (see requirements.lock).

Successfully built installers and portable archives can be found in the ./dist directory. NSIS unfortunately doesn’t support reproducible builds, so the checksums of the installers will always vary. The portable archives however are reproducible if the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH env var is set.