Building Unreal Tools Framework

Requirements to build Unreal Tools Framework

  • Git LFS. If installed after cloning the repository, run git lfs fetch command in the root repository folder and the root folders of any git submodules.
  • Visual Studio 2022
  • Azure Command Line Interface
  • You may need to use a command prompt with Administrator rights.

Nuke

The build folder contains a Nuke project with all the steps needed to:

  • Clean
  • Download engine binaries from universal packages.
  • Create symlinks to build directory structure needed by the engine.
  • Generate project files
  • Build UnrealToolsFrameworkTests blank game, with UnrealToolsFramework (and Bifrost) as dependencies.

Configuring your machine to build Unreal Tools Framework

Important notes:

  • You may need to use a command prompt with elevated rights.
  • You may have issues fetching Unreal dependencies if you use a checkout directory that is too long

The Unreal Engine binaries are stored as a universal package and downloaded via Nuke during the build process. You will need to configure your PC using Azure CLI to download from project artifacts.

  1. Download and install Azure CLI
  2. Install Azure DevOps extension: az extension add -n azure-devops
  3. Create a Personal Access Token with Packaging/Read permissions.
  4. Login
    1. Run az login
    2. In some cases you may need to pass the Azure DevOps organization: az devops login --organization https://dev.azure.com/xboxstudios/
  5. The Microsoft.XboxStudios.NukeExt NuGet package must be installed. Install the Azure artifacts credential provider if needed and then run dotnet restore --interactive build.

Building Unreal Tools Framework with Nuke

Building the C++ portion of the UnrealToolkit will generate a small sample Unreal game called UTFTests with the UTK installed as a game level plugin. This solution can be found under cpp/tests/UTFTests.

UnrealToolkit's Nuke project supports building UTFTests in the following build configurations:

Unreal Configuration Nuke Build Target
Development Editor CompileCPP
DebugGame Editor CompileCPPDebug
Shipping CompileCPPShipping

Unreal Engine's 'Test' configuration is not available for compilation because our build process uses precompiled Unreal Engine binaries instead of the raw code.

By default, the CI/CD pipeline for the UTK will only compile Development Editor configuration. If you are modifying the UTK C++ code, please run all Nuke targets described above to ensure your changes compile appropriately.

To build the sample game, follow these steps:

  1. Open an Administrator terminal in the root of your local UnrealToolkit repo folder.
  2. Run one of the build scripts with any of the Nuke targets in the above table as an argument from the root folder in the repository.
    1. Example: .\build.cmd CompileCPP.
    2. Example: .\build.cmd CompileCPPShipping.
  3. This will generate the UTFTests sample game with the UTK installed as a game level plugin.

This page was last modified on May 19 2025, 05:07 PM (UTC).