| description | Prepare build of Thunderbird. |
|---|
- At least 4 GB of RAM. 8 GB or more is recommended. While you can build Thunderbird on older hardware it can take quite a bit of time to compile on slower machines with less RAM.
- Good internet connection for the initial source download.
The Thunderbird build will take up to 30 GB of disk space in order to complete. Be sure to have enough free space and a fast internet connection to avoid interruptions.
Depending on your Operating System you will need to carry out a different process to prepare your machine. So firstly complete the instructions for your OS and then continue following the setup with the Build Configuration.
To build Thunderbird, you need to create a file named mozconfig to the root directory of the mozilla-central checkout that contains the option comm/mail enabled. You can create a file with this line by doing this in the source/ directory:
echo 'ac_add_options --enable-application=comm/mail' > mozconfig
If you omit this line, the build system will build Firefox instead. Other build configuration options can be added to this file, although it's strongly recommended that you only use options that you fully understand. For example, to create a debug build instead of a release build, that file would also contain the line:
echo 'ac_add_options --enable-debug' >> mozconfig
Each of these ac_add_options entries needs to be on its own line.
For more on configuration options, see the page Configuring build options. Note that if you use an MOZ_OBJDIR it cannot be a sibling folder to your source directory. Use an absolute path to be sure!
Go ahead to the Building Thunderbird page and continue following the guide.
{% page-ref page="./" %}