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description How to build and run Thunderbird.

Building Thunderbird

Prerequisites

Ensure that your Prerequisites for the build are met.

You should have done the following:

  • Installed tools for ./mach bootstrap depending on your OS
  • Finished ./mach bootstrap in Firefox for Desktop mode
  • The Build Configuration in a seperate source/mozconfig file so that Thunderbird is build and not Firefox

Building

{% hint style="warning" %} Before you start, make sure that the version you checked out is not busted. For hg tip, you should see green Bs on https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=comm-central {% endhint %}

The build is started in the source directory with:

./mach build

mach is our command-line tool to streamline common developer tasks. See the mach article for more.

Building can take a significant amount of time, depending on your system, OS, and chosen build options. Linux builds on a fast box may take under 15 minutes, but Windows builds on a slow box may take several hours.

Make Your Build Faster

Follow this guide to rely on sccache and other Tips for making builds faster.

Running Thunderbird

To run your build, you can use:

./mach run

There are various command line parameters you can add, e.g. to specify a profile.

Various temporary files, libraries, and the Thunderbird executable will be found in your object directory (under comm-central/), which is prefixed with obj-. The exact name depends on your system and OS. For example, a Mac user may get an object directory name of obj-x86_64-apple-darwin10.7.3/.

The Thunderbird executable in particular, and its dependencies are located under the dist/bin folder under the object directory. To run the executable from your comm-central working directory:

  • Windows: obj-.../dist/bin/thunderbird.exe
  • Linux: obj-.../dist/bin/thunderbird
  • macOS: obj-.../dist/Daily.app/Contents/MacOS/thunderbird

Update and Build Again

To pull down the latest changes, in the mozilla directory run the following commands:

hg pull -u
cd comm
hg pull -u
cd ..

or to do it via one command:

hg pull -u; (cd comm; hg pull -u)

Then just run the ./mach build command detailed in the Building instructions above. This will only recompile files that changed, but it may still take a long time.

Rebuilding

To build after changes you can simply run:

./mach build

Rebuilding Specific Parts

If you have made many changes, but only want to rebuild specific parts, you may run the following commands.

C or C++ Files:

./mach build binaries

JavaScript or XUL Files (Windows Only):

./mach build path/to/dir

{% hint style="info" %} Replace path/to/dir with the directory with the files changed.

This is the tricky bit since you need to specify the directory that installs the files, which may be a parent directory of the changed file's directory. For example, to just rebuild the Lightning calendar extension:

./mach build comm/calendar/lightning

{% endhint %}