I am trying to set up UE 5.4 Windows project builds within a Windows Docker container. I created a container using the build.bat file as instructed here. Upon running a container using the image, there is no engine installed in the image in order to run step 6 here. Am I only able to build Windows runtime images? How can I update the image in order to be able to build a project like the Linux dev images?
Hi Cameron,
The Windows container images provided with the Unreal Engine are only runtime images, not development images. This limitation is briefly discussed in the Known Limitations page of the containers documentation, and is also alluded to in the instructions from the Building the Windows Container Images from Source page that you linked:
> To build the Windows container images, double-click the build.bat file. This will build the Windows runtime image for the same version of Windows that your machine is running.
If you want to build Windows development images then you will need to use the upstream ue4-docker open source project, which is also what is used to generate the Dockerfiles for the Linux development images provided with the engine.
In terms of whether Epic will be able to provide Windows development images in the future, there are currently technical blockers regarding upstream support for the required BuildKit features. Although the introduction of experimental Windows support for BuildKit represents promising progress towards addressing these blockers, this support is still not yet mature enough to build Windows development images for UE. There is also the possibility that the engine’s Wine container images might someday support building Windows projects, although it is important to note that C++ compilation is not currently supported, so the Wine images are only capable of packaging Blueprint-only projects today. (For more details, see the Wine-Enabled Containers Quick Start documentation page, and the Workload Status doc in the WineResources repository.)
Regards,
Adam
Despite its now-outdated name, the ue4-docker project does indeed support Unreal Engine 5.x. As I mentioned previously, ue4-docker is used on an ongoing basis to generate the Linux development Dockerfiles for every new UE release.
Is the ue4-docker project only viable for Unreal Engine 4 projects? We are building UE 5.4 editor plugins.