Installing Primer3

Question

I need to install Primer3 for my research in Windows, and I really have no idea of how to go about it. I was following the instructions mentioned here.

I'm getting to the part where I need to run

    mingw32-make TESTOPTS=--windows

and I keep getting an error saying:

    'mingw32-make' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
    operable program or batch file.

Just for reference, I went into the minGW Installation manager and got the ming32-make packages, including the bin, doc, lang, and lic ones, because I really had no idea which one was the correct one. If someone could help me, I would be very grateful! Installing these niche programs without an installation wizard is a challenge!

Answer 1

You will need to install mingw32-make. This is a Windows of port of GNU Make, a software-build tool that is supported on all operating systems, indeed the daddy of such tools.

But make alone will not suffice. To build primer3 you will need a Windows port of the whole GNU toolchain for building software from source code. Without that, running make by itself will just expose the absence of the GCC compiler and linker that it expects to do its bidding.

This is quite a lot of software, but it is easy and quick to install and there are several open-source offerings. I suggest you go to TDM GCC and download the TDM64 bundle. This will give you an executable installer. Just run it and you will end up with the complete GNU toolchain, including, mingw32-make, in your chosen installation directory.

It will also install in your Windows launch menu the MinGW command prompt. Launch this and you will be presented with a Windows commandline console with its environment set up to find and run any of the GNU tools.

In this console change directory to your primer3-X.Y.Z/test directory and then run mingw32-make TESTOPTS=--windows as per documentation.

Be forwarned that the self-tests of primer3 that are executed to verify the build may take 1/2 hr. to 1 hr. to run, depending on your hardware, but they will finish successfully with the steps I've described, barring problems specific to your machine. It is a foolproof-simple build. All the built executables are deposited in the primer3-X.Y.Z/src directory. You may want to move them somewhere more convenient in in your PATH.

It does seem oddly amateurish that the documentation simply directs you to run mingw32-make with no preliminary account of what that is or how to install it, while on the other hand it advises that you must install perl and strongly recommends a specific perl distribution; but evidently primer3 is open-source scientfic software and its documentation is not bad by the standard of that genre.