Current master branch:

This is the new repository for the Meterpreter source, which was originally in the Metasploit Framework source.

Meterpreter is now being built with Visual Studio 2012 Express for Desktop or any paid version of Visual Studio 2012. Earlier toolsets on Windows are no longer supported.

Visual Studio 2012 requires .NET 4.5 in order to run, and as a result isn't compatible with Windows XP due to the fact that .NET 4.5 will not run on Windows XP. However, this does not mean that Metepreter itself will not run on Windows XP, it just means that it's not possible to build it on Windows XP.

In order to build successfully with this version of Visual Studio you must first make sure that the most recent updates have been applied. At the time of writing, the latest known update is Update 3. Without this update you won't be able to build.

To make sure you have the appropriate updates applied:

1. Open Visual Studio 2012.
2. Open the Tools menu and select Extensions and Updates
3. Select the Updates item on the left side of the dialog box.
4. Follow the prompts to install any updates that are found.

With those updates applied you should be ready to build Meterpreeter.

Open up a Visual Studio command prompt by selecting Developer Command Prompt for VS2012 from the Start menu. Alternatively you can run vcvars32.bat from an existing command line prompt, just make sure it's the VS2012 one if you have multiple versions of VS installed on your machine.

Once you have your environment variables set up, change to the root folder where the meterpreter source is located. From here you can:

• Build the x86 version by running: make x86
• Build the x64 version by running: make x64
• Build both x86 and x64 versions by running: make

The compiled binaries are written to the output/x86 and output/x64 folders.

If you are not a Rapid7 employee, make sure you build the source using the debug or release configurations when inside Visual Studio. If you attempt to build r7_debug or r7_release you will get compiler errors due to missing libraries.

If you build the source from the command line the toolset will choose the most appropriate build configuration for you and hence calling make should "Just Work™".

If you are a Rapid7 employee you will need the PSSDK source in order to build the extra components using the r7_* build configurations.

You will need:

• A compiler toolchain (build-essential package on Ubuntu)
• gcc-multilib, if you're building on a 64-bit machine
• jam
• wget

Meterpreter requires libpcap-1.1.1 and OpenSSL 0.9.8o sources, which it will download automatically during the build process. If for some reason, you cannot access the internet during build, you will need to:

• wget -O posix-meterp-build-tmp/openssl-0.9.8o.tar.gz http://openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8o.tar.gz
• wget -O posix-meterp-build-tmp/libpcap-1.1.1.tar.gz http://www.tcpdump.org/release/libpcap-1.1.1.tar.gz

Note that the 'depclean' and 'really-clean' make targets will delete these files.

Now you should be able to type make in the base directory, go make a sandwich, and come back to a working[1] meterpreter for Linux.

[1] For some value of "working." Meterpreter in POSIX environments is not considered stable. It does stuff, but expect occasional problems.

There is currently no automated testing for meterpreter, but we're working on it.

Once you've made changes and compiled a new .dll or .so, copy the contents of the output/ directory into your Metasploit Framework's data/meterpreter/ directory. In POSIX you can do this automatically if metasploit-framework and meterpreter live in the same place by running make install

If you made any changes to metsrv.dll or msflinker_linux_x86.bin, ensure that all extensions still load and function properly.