Contributing to Thunderbird
Documentation & Resources
A collection of the most important developer resources outside of developer.thunderbird.net.
WebExtension Development
A few helpful resources relevant for developing WebExtensions for Thunderbird.
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Description
The official Thunderbird add-on repository.
A list of all supported values, which can be used as
strict_min_version and strict_max_version values in add-on manifest files. A guide from the extension workshop with the most recent information on debugging add-ons. It is written for Mozilla Firefox but applies for Thunderbird as well.
A guide how to use Visual Studio Code to debug Thunderbird extension.
Documentation of all Extension APIs created specifically for Thunderbird. They are called MailExtension APIs to distinguish them from the standard WebExtension APIs inherited from Firefox.
A collection of MailExtensions, showing how to use Thunderbird WebExtension APIs.
A collection of WebExtensions, showing how to use WebExtension APIs. They probably won’t work directly in Thunderbird, but they may provide hints on how to use some of the WebExtension APIs that Thunderbird inherited from Firefox.
The add-on developer support repository provides useful code snippets, examples and tools in order to better "weather" the transition to the new extension structure of Thunderbird 78.
Overall add-on statistics and a very powerful search in the code of all add-ons listed on addons.thunderbird.net (ATN) and a few other public repositories.
Central bug tracking for Mozilla projects. Some useful pages related to Thunderbird:
The main documentation for Mozilla developers. As Thunderbird is based on the Mozilla platform, some Mozilla documentation is valid for Thunderbird as well. Useful MDN pages on WebExtension are:
Legacy Extension Development
Useful resources for converting legacy extensions or for creating WebExtension Experiments.
Description
An online viewer to search the Firefox code base (mozilla-central) and the Thunderbird code base (comm-central).
The current Firefox code documentation, which might be needed when converting legacy extensions.
The archived Mozilla documentation includes information about internal components and functions used by legacy extensions. Please be aware, that those pages are not maintained and are potentially outdated. Some useful direct links:
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