Last updated
Last updated
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 from mozilla/comm-central is that --enable-bootstrap is set so that the toolchains download automatically. If you do not have an active internet connection then
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 .
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.
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.
Once you have Mercurial and MozPhab installed, you are ready to grab the source code. There are a couple of different methods to do this.
Mozilla-central will build Firefox without the comm-central repo present and a few options set. Mozilla-central is the Firefox codebase and comm-central features the additions that turn Firefox into Thunderbird.
This will create a mozilla-unified directory with both a mozconfig and a comm/ folder inside. The mozconfig file is setup to build Thunderbird and you can verify this with cat mozconfig; the --enable-project parameter should be comm/mail:
If you would rather manually gather the source code, perform the bootstrap, and create your mozconfig file, then follow these steps.
Get the latest Mozilla source code from Mozilla's mozilla-central Mercurial code repository, and check it out into a local directory source (or however you want to call it). Then, get the latest Thunderbird source code from Mozilla's comm-central Mercurial code repository. It needs to be placed inside the Mozilla source code, in a directory named comm/:
mozconfig fileIn the source directory run the following command to get additional dependencies needed to install Thunderbird:
You will be presented with the following options:
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.
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
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:
As noted in the , both mozilla-central and comm-central are version controlled with Mercurial. This means you will need to install Mercurial. Here is a quick command to install it with mercurial but for a more complete list of instructions, please see .
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 . 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.
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, .
If one or both commands return an empty output, you need to install them manually. We recommend using to download and install these packages in your system. After that, follow these steps:
Go back to the page and continue following the guide:
This page has all the information you need to get your macOS development environment set up and ready to hack on Thunderbird.