Setting Up A Build Environment
This page has all the information you need to get your development environment set up and ready to hack on Thunderbird.
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This page has all the information you need to get your development environment set up and ready to hack on Thunderbird.
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Before you can build Thunderbird, please follow your platform's build prerequisites page:
Mozilla uses the software to propose, review, incorporate, and log changes to its code. In order to contribute to Thunderbird, you will need to be able to use this software.
Information for how to install Mercurial is available .
The latest Mozilla source code comes from Mozilla's mozilla-central Mercurial code repository, often called source/ but it can be named anything you like. The latest Thunderbird source code comes from Mozilla's comm-central Mercurial code repository and needs to be placed inside the Mozilla source code, in a directory that must be named comm/.
Mozilla-central will build Firefox without the comm-central repo present and a few options set (detailed on the page).
Thunderbird is built on the Mozilla platform, the same base that Firefox is built from. As such the two projects share a lot of code and much of the documentation for one will apply, in many ways, to the other. If at any point you are looking for answers that you can't find here, here are some additional useful resources:
If you have already gone through the relevant build prerequisite steps, then let's build the latest Thunderbird: