macOS Build Prerequisites

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This page has all the information you need to get your macOS development environment set up and ready to hack on Thunderbird.

This guide assumes you already followed the Getting Started documentation and you already downloaded mozilla-central and comm-central source code.
Install Xcode
Xcode is a prerequisite to build Firefox an you will need administrator permissions on your machine to install it. You can verify that you have these permission in System Preferences -> Users & Groups.)
Xcode is pretty large and it could take up to 1 hour to complete the download and installation process
Install macOS SDK headers
After installing Xcode you will find the SDK header at this location
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cd /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/
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Launch the MacOSX{your-version}.sdk (eg. MacOSX10.14.sdk) by double clicking on it and follow the installation instructions.
Bootstrap your system
Access the location where you downloaded the mozilla-central source code, most likely source/ and trigger this command:
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./mach bootstrap
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You will be asked to choose from the following list of options
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Please choose the version of Firefox you want to build:
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  1. Firefox for Desktop Artifact Mode
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  2. Firefox for Desktop
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  3. GeckoView/Firefox for Android Artifact Mode
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  4. GeckoView/Firefox for Android
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Please choose option 2 to proceed with a successful build.
This action will install all the libraries and dependencies necessary to build Thunderbird locally.
Missing libraries
It could happen that some libraries will not be installed by the bootstrap command, specifically Rust and Go. Check if these packages are available in your system by running these commands in your terminal:
which rustc
which cargo
If one or both commands return an empty output, you need to install them manually. We recommend using HomeBrew to download and install these packages in your system. After that, follow these steps:
Install Rust: brew install rust
Install C bindings: cargo install cbindgen
If you get a command not found error while running cargo, but the command which cargo returns the location of the that package, it means you need to update your PATH inside your .bashrc file to include the cargo location:
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export PATH=$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH
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You're all set
Got back to the Building Thunderbird page and continue following the guide:
Building Thunderbird

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Contents

Install Xcode

Install macOS SDK headers

Bootstrap your system

Missing libraries

You're all set