If you are planning on doing any development work on Roam or are wanting to stay current with recent changes you will need to build from source.

Setting QGIS path

First set your QGIS home path and version in scripts\setenv.bat. The default will look in C:\OSGeo4W

...
SET OSGEO4W_ROOT=C:\OSGeo4W
SET QGISNAME=qgis
SET QGIS=%OSGEO4W_ROOT%\apps\%QGISNAME%
set QGIS_PREFIX_PATH=%QGIS%
...

Build environment setup

IntraMaps Roam is complied and built as a standalone Python application. In order to do this we need to download and install a few tools into QGIS Python install, mainly py2exe.

You will need:

Will 64bit QGIS work?

Maybe I haven't tried but you are welcome.

The easy way

  1. Download and install Visual Studio C++ Express
  2. Install QGIS using OSGeo4W
  3. Update you QGIS path in scripts\setenv.bat
  4. Run scripts\setupdev.bat

setupdev.bat will download and install py2exe, easy_install, pip, and anything else the project needs.

INSTALL NOTE: If you get a ValueError when running setupdev.bat sometimes Python can't run the visual studio batch file. Simply run C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Tools\vsvars32.bat in the shell before running setupdev.bat

Creating the binary package

IntraMaps Roam is built as a standalone fully packaged Python application using py2exe on Windows. Once built as a binary package QGIS is not required on the users machine.

  1. Run package.bat
  2. Errors will be in the shell, everything else in package.log
  3. Final output will be in dist\
  4. Everything in dist\ can be copied to the users machine and installed without needing QGIS.

Release package

Running scripts\make_release.bat will creata a self extracting installer and zip file in the release folder