Utilize pre-installed MinGW in GitHub actions?

Question

Currently I've been using egor-tensin/setup-mingw to setup MinGW for our CI and it's been working fine.

- name: Set up MinGW
  uses: egor-tensin/setup-mingw@v2
- name: Configure
  run: cmake -S. -B build ... -G "Ninja"

However, I noticed that the windows runner already has MinGW pre-installed.

Currently the aforementioned action takes about 5 minutes to setup MinGW. Ideally using the pre-installed MinGW would speed up this part of the CI process.

How can I use the pre-installed MinGW to speed up our GitHub workflow?

Answer 1

It's very simple, just use bash as the shell. This is how I do it:

  mingw64-gcc:
    name: MinGW GCC

    runs-on: windows-2019

    defaults:
      run:
        shell: bash

    steps:
      - name: "Setup"
        run: |
          gcc --version

Answer 2

I wasn't able to get anything with shell: to work. Instead, a simple solution is to just add

$env:PATH = "C:\msys64\usr\bin;$env:PATH"

at the start of the run: block. This will put the msys64 environment on your PATH.

For other environments, you will need to put first the environment-specific bin dir, then the msys64 bin dir to match how MSYS2 sets it up. So, for the ucrt64 environment, it would look like

$env:PATH = "C:\msys64\ucrt64\bin;C:\msys64\usr\bin;$env:PATH"

This obviously has limitations in that you don't have an actual bash shell, but it was enough for me to successfully compile a CMake project.