Ever since the day we opened up our GitButler beta, there is one thing that has been asked more than anything else. "When will you have a Windows build?"

Well the long wait is over. The day is today!

Roughly how this got shipped.

You can now download our freshly signed Windows GitButler MSI build here.

GitButler native on Windows!

Why Did It Take So Long?

You may well wonder why it took us a few months to get a Windows build out there. After all, Tauri is a cross platform framework, right?

Well, it turns out there are a few things that are quite different in Windows than in more POSIX-y systems like Mac and Linux that took a bit more work than we had anticipated. Also none of the core team here uses Windows regularly, so we weren't really dogfooding it.

Some high level issues we needed to deal with include:

  • Path handling differences (yay backslashes!)
  • OpenSSL issues (Perl is still involved somehow)
  • Signing binaries for Windows is a fresh new kind of hell

If you're specifically curious about the details of how we got our Tauri app binary signed, we're writing up all the gory details and will post that in a few days.

TLDR

In any case, it's done and there should be signed Windows builds alongside our Linux and Mac builds for all of our general releases from now on.

If you're on Windows, please check it out and help us out with feedback and experiences so we can make our beta a little less beta soon.