Installing make under Git for Windows

I'm one of those people who never really switched to a Mac for work, and I'm still only dipping my toes in WSL, so most of the time I'm using the Git For Windows flavor of MSYS2/MinGW. It comes with the most common collection of programs you'd use in a terminal environment, such as less and grep. However, one of the tools I find most useful in my daily work is make and it's not included in the default installation so I have to install it manually. In this post I'll show you how to do that.

This guide is a condensed version of evanwill's brilliant gist which outlines how to install other utilities as well, such as wget.

1. Download make-4.3-without-guile-w32-bin.zip from ezwinports.
   The version number might be higher since they are continuously publishing newer versions.
2. Extract the contents to your C:\Program Files\Git\mingw64 folder without overwriting existing files.

Tada!

You can verify that it was installed succesfully by running make --version:

$ make --version

GNU Make 4.3
Built for Windows32
Copyright (C) 1988-2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

There really aren't that many steps involved, but every time I get a new computer I have to look it up.