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.

Hardware Requirements

30 GB of free space

The Thunderbird build can use 30-40GB of disk space to complete depending on your operating system.

Note that while it's not technically required to have an internet connection to build, the default when building Thunderbird is that --enable-bootstrap is set so that the toolchains download automatically.

Build Environment

Python

You will need python (version 3.8 or later) and pipx (used to install packages from pypi). Both of these can be installed from homebrew. If you have not yet setup homebrew, please see the homebrew installation instructions.

brew install python pipx

Note that once homebrew is installed, the macOS SDK headers are installed already and can be found under /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs. There should be no additional action required to install these SDK headers.

Use pipx to install mozphab

MozPhab is the tool needed to interface with Mozilla's instance of Phabricator. This step is needed before the bootstrap step. Pipx is the tool that we will use to install MozPhab and then we will make sure the relevant ~/.local/bin has been added to the PATH envirnoment variable.

pipx install MozPhab
pipx ensurepath 

Git

As noted in the Setting up a build environment page, both Firefox and Thunderbird sources are stored in Git repositories. This means you will need to install Git if it is not already available. Here is a quick command to install it:

brew install git

Get the Source

Once you have Git and MozPhab installed, you are ready to grab the source code. There are a couple of different methods to do this.

Firefox can build without Thunderbird present in the comm/ repo and a few options set. The Thunderbird code base features the additions that turn Firefox into Thunderbird.

Scripted

We have created and host a script that will grab the two source repos you need, run ./mach bootstrap for you, and sets up a necessary mozconfig file. This script is called bootstrap.py. Download this file to the directory where you would like your source code folder to live, either by clicking the link and moving the file to the appropriate location or using wget. Then we will make it executable and run it.

mkdir tb-build && cd tb-build
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-desktop/main/python/rocboot/bin/bootstrap.py
chmod +x bootstrap.py
./bootstrap.py

This will create a source/ directory with both a mozconfig and a comm/ folder inside.

The source/ repository contains the Firefox source and defaults to the main branch.

The source/comm repository also defaults to the main branch.

The mozconfig file is setup to build Thunderbird and you can verify this with cat mozconfig; the --enable-project parameter should be comm/mail:

ac_add_options --enable-project=comm/mail

Manually

If you would rather manually gather the source code, perform the bootstrap, and create your mozconfig file, then follow these steps.

Checkout the Source Code

Get the latest Firefox source code, and check it out into a local directory source (or however you want to call it). Then, get the latest Thunderbird source code. It needs to be placed inside the Mozilla source code, in a directory named comm/:

git clone https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox source/
cd source/
git clone https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-desktop comm/

Create mozconfig file

This step will need to be performed if you manually checked out the code and performed the bootstrap, and it will covered in the next section you follow, Building Thunderbird.

Mach Bootstrap

In the source directory run the following command to get additional dependencies needed to install Thunderbird:

./mach bootstrap

You will be presented with the following options:

Please choose the version of Firefox you want to build:
  1. Firefox for Desktop Artifact Mode
  2. Firefox for Desktop
  3. GeckoView/Firefox for Android Artifact Mode
  4. GeckoView/Firefox for Android

Please choose option 2 to proceed with a successful build.

This action should install all the remaining 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:

export PATH=$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH

You're all set

Go back to the Building Thunderbird page and continue following the guide:

Building Thunderbird