macOS Build Prerequisites
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
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:
You will be asked to choose from the following list of options
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:
You're all set
Got back to the Building Thunderbird page and continue following the guide:
pageBuilding ThunderbirdLast updated