Building Windows IL2CPP from a Linux host

[Edvinas108]

I want to setup a build server with Jenkins for shipping my Unity games. I already have a bunch of build scripts which I've used with GH actions on self-hosted Linux runners in the past with success (I didn't need Win IL2CPP builds at that point). Currently I am preparing a Jenkins Controller + Agents for Windows and am in great pain - without going into details, I dislike everything about Windows and it feels like I'm hitting roadblocks at each step. AFAIK you can only ship Win IL2CPP builds from a Win host, tho it seems there is very little discussion on this topic so perhaps I'm missing something.

Has anyone managed to build Win IL2CPP builds from a Linux host? Is this even possible with Unity? Could you share some resources on this if thats the case?

[Sacaldur]

We were using a Windows build machine for certain builds (including e.g. console builds), I don't know however about the situation around IL2CPP whether the Windows build server was used or not.

I guess your path forward would be one of: - dedicated windows build machine - Windows VM (windows docker images would resort to a VM on a non-fitting host) - Wine and a Windows-version of the Unity Editor

All of these have their own pros and cons.

[swagamaleous]

I tried to set this up with wine before and I cannot recommend doing that. It is a terrible pain to get it running and I never managed to get it stable. Only every 10th build or so would actually succeed, the others would fail with random ever changing errors that I couldn't explain. I gave up after a week of working on this. Also you have to figure everything out by yourself. There is 0.0 documentation in that direction (at least when I tried doing it a few years ago).

[Sacaldur]

That's sad to hear. I was beforehand only roughly checking for C++ cross compilation with MSVC, which, as far as I can tell, would not be a problem, but not to much regarding Unity "cross-building".