macOS Build Prerequisites
This guide assumes you already followed the Getting Started documentation and you already downloaded mozilla-central and comm-central source code.
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
After installing Xcode you will find the SDK header at this location
cd /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/
Launch the MacOSX{your-version}.sdk (eg. MacOSX10.14.sdk) by double clicking on it and follow the installation instructions.
Access the location where you downloaded the mozilla-central source code, most likely source/ and trigger this command:
./mach bootstrap
You will be asked to choose from the following list of options
Please choose the version of Firefox you want to build:1. Firefox for Desktop Artifact Mode2. Firefox for Desktop3. GeckoView/Firefox for Android Artifact Mode4. GeckoView/Firefox for Android
Please choose option 2 to proceed with a successful build.
This action will install all the libraries and dependencies necessary to build Thunderbird locally.
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 rustcwhich 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 rustcInstall 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:
export PATH=$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH
Got back to the Building Thunderbird page and continue following the guide:
