# Building OVITO on Windows

## Installing dependencies

OVITO for Windows is typically built using Microsoft's Visual C++ 2015 compiler. However, building it with the MinGW compiler should still be possible too.

More instructions how to build the required dependencies on Windows and OVITO itself can be found in the file `doc/develop/build_windows_howto.txt` after downloading the source code. The required steps are quite involved, and the available instructions may be insufficient. Please contact the author if you want to build OVITO on Windows and get stuck.

## Downloading the source code

To download OVITO's source code into a new subdirectory named `ovito`, install Git and run:

    git clone https://gitlab.com/stuko/ovito.git ovito

from the command line or go to https://gitlab.com/stuko/ovito