You can build a bleeding-edge, development version of Sunbird using the commands below. For complete information, see the build documentation.

Installing build tools

If your system is not listed below, see the build prerequisites page.

sudo apt-get build-dep sunbird
sudo apt-get install mercurial libasound2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libnotify-dev libiw-dev autoconf2.13 cvs

sudo yum groupinstall 'Development Tools' 'Development Libraries' 'GNOME Software Development'
sudo yum install mercurial autoconf213 glibc-static libstdc++-static yasm wireless-tools-devel mesa-libGL-devel

Building Sunbird

Building Sunbird requires at least 2.5 GB of disk space, 500 MB of RAM, and lots of available swap space.

• On Windows, if you open the command prompt you are usually in your user profile folder which often contains spaces ( C:\Documents and Settings\...). This causes problems while building. To avoid this issue, change to a directory without spaces (i.e. C:\ ) before doing the following steps. You can use the "cd" command to do so.

# Get the source
hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/
cd comm-central
python client.py checkout

# Setup a basic .mozconfig file
echo 'ac_add_options --enable-application=calendar' > .mozconfig               # let's build Sunbird...
echo 'mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-sb-release' >> .mozconfig   # ...in this directory...

# USE THIS ONLY IF NOT ON WINDOWS!  Parallel compilation on Windows is
# unreliable now due to bug 524149.
echo 'mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j4"' >> .mozconfig                       # ...quickly.

# Build
make -f client.mk

• For a debug build, you need different configuration options in your .mozconfig file.  This requires more disk space, about 2.5 GB.
  

  mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-sb-debug
  ac_add_options --enable-application=calendar
  ac_add_options --enable-debug
  ac_add_options --disable-optimize
  

Running Sunbird

The Sunbird executable can be found in objdir-sb-release/mozilla/dist/bin/ (on Mac, objdir-sb-release/dist/Calendar.app/Contents/MacOS/). 

Building Sunbird and Lightning

If you've set up you build environment as above, then all you need to do is:

echo 'ac_add_options --enable-calendar' >> .mozconfig

or just add the ac_add_options --enable-calendar line to your .mozconfig with your favourite editor.

Then just re-run the "make -f client.mk" command above (you can do the addition before running make for the first time).

This will build the lightning extension into src/../objdir-sb/mozilla/dist/xpi-stage/. See this section for information on how to easily integrate Lightning into a nightly version of Thunderbird.

How to build again later

In your comm-central directory, run these commands:

# Get the latest source
python client.py checkout

Then just re-run the "make -f client.mk" command above. make will only recompile files that changed, but it's still a long haul. An incremental build can be faster.

Building just Lightning

After you have completed a full build, if you would like to rebuild Lightning you don't need to go through the whole build process:

# Enter the calendar directory in the object-directory
cd src/../objdir-sb-release/calendar

# Make the Lightning extension
make -C lightning

References

• General Build Documentation
• comm-central