Building Thunderbird
How to build and run Thunderbird.
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How to build and run Thunderbird.
Last updated
Was this helpful?
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.
30 GB of free space. The Thunderbird build can use up to 30-40GB of disk space to complete depending on your operating system.
Good internet connection for the initial source download.
Depending on your Operating System you will need to carry out a different process to prepare your machine. So first complete the instructions for your OS and then continue following these build instructions.
To build Thunderbird, you need a file named mozconfig in the root directory of the mozilla-central checkout that contains the option comm/mail enabled. If you do not already have this file, then you can create it with this line by doing this in the source/ directory:
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 recommended that you only use options that you fully understand. Here are come recommended options to use and why:
To create a debug build instead of a release build: ac_add_options --enable-debug
To speed up subsequent builds by caching compilation results for both C++ and Rust: ac_add_options --with-ccache=sccache
To enable some additional checks we have enabled in the CI: ac_add_options --enable-clang-plugin
To enable debug symbols: ac_add_options --enable-debug-symbols
To enable autoclobber: mk_add_options AUTOCLOBBER=1
Each of these ac_add_options entries needs to be on its own line.
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.
To run your build, you can use:
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
To pull down the latest changes, in the mozilla directory run the following commands:
or to do it via one command:
To build after changes you can simply run:
If you have made many changes, but only want to rebuild specific parts, you may run the following commands.
For more info on configuration options, see the page . Note that if you use a MOZ_OBJDIR it cannot be a sibling folder to your source directory. Use an absolute path to be sure!
Before you start, make sure that the version you checked out is not busted. For hg tip, you should see green Bs on
After you have met the for your OS, the build is started in the source directory with:
mach is our command-line tool to streamline common developer tasks. See the article for more.
Follow this guide to rely on and other .
Then just run the ./mach build command detailed in the instructions above. This will only recompile files that changed, but it may still take a long time.