4.4 KiB
Set up to build Firefox Developer Tools
These are the steps we're going to look at:
- Getting the code
- Building and running locally
- Rebuilding
- Artifact builds for even faster builds
- Maybe you don't even need to build
Getting the code
The code is officially hosted on a Mercurial repository. Despair not! There are ways of accessing this via git. We will explain this too.
Either way takes a long time, because the repository is B I G. So be prepared to be patient.
Using Mercurial (hg)
hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central
Using git
There is a tool called git-cinnabar that lets you use git on top of a Mercurial repository. There's a bit of setup involved, so we've written a script to automate installing git-cinnabar and obtaining the code.
Building and running locally
Whatever method you used to obtain the code, the build step is the same. Fortunately, the Firefox team has made a very good job of automating this with bootstrap scripts and putting documentation together.
Run:
./mach build
If your system needs additional dependencies installed (for example, Python, or a compiler, etc), various diagnostic messages will be printed to your screen. Follow their advice and try building again.
Building also takes a long time (specially on slow computers).
Note: if using Windows, you might need to type mach build instead (without the ./).
Running your own compiled version of Firefox
To run the Firefox you just compiled:
./mach run
This will run using an empty temporary profile which is discarded when you close the browser. We will look more into persistent development profiles later.
Rebuilding
Suppose you pulled the latest changes from the remote repository (or made your own changes) and want to build again.
You can ask the mach script to build only changed files:
./mach build faster
This should be faster (a matter of seconds).
Sometimes, if you haven't updated in a while, you'll be told that you need to clobber, or basically delete precompiled stuff and start from scratch, because there are too many changes. The way to do it is:
./mach clobber
./mach build
Building even faster with artifact builds
If you are not going to modify any C/C++ code (which is rare when working on DevTools), you can use artifact builds. This method downloads prebuilt binary components, and then the build process becomes faster.
Create a file on the root of the repository, called mozconfig, with the following content:
# Automatically download and use compiled C++ components:
ac_add_options --enable-artifact-builds
# Write build artifacts to:
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=./objdir-frontend
And then you can follow the normal build process again (only faster!)
On MacOS you might want to use MOZ_OBJDIR=./objdir-frontend.noindex instead. Using the .noindex file extension prevents the Spotlight from indexing your objdir, which is slow.
For more information on aspects such as technical limitations of artifact builds, read the Artifact Builds page.
Maybe you don't even need to build
Working in DevTools generally involves editing JavaScript files only. This means that often you don't even need to run ./mach build.
Instead, what you need to do is to save the files you modified, quit Firefox, and reopen it again to use the recently saved files.
With pseudocode:
# 1. Build
./mach build
# 2. Run
./mach run
# 3. you try out things in the browser that opens
# 4. fully close the browser, e.g. ⌘Q in MacOS
# 5. edit JS files on the `devtools` folder, save
# 6. Back to step 2!
./mach run
While not as fast as the average "save file and reload the website" web development workflow, or newer workflows such as React's reloading, this can still be quite fast.
And certainly faster than building each time, even with artifact builds.