Building Firefox in Windows

I don't know if I was doing anything wrong or maybe if I had chosen the wrong set of build options, but building Firefox from source code does take pretty long on my pc. The whole build process took about 90 minutes of my life and 1.2GBs of hard drive space. I never thought that the files would be so large, so I had to start deleting stuff while it was compiling. Well, here is what I did to get it built. I was able to do this with cygwin and msys.

**NOTE: You will need about 2GBs of HD space before you begin. 250MBs for the cvs source, about 100MB for the tools (could be less but I had cygwin pre-installed), and 1.2GBs for the code?

STEP 1.
Download and install Visual Studios 2005 (referred to as VC8 on Mozilla sites).
Seneca students should be able to download and install this from our ACS site.
Click here for ACS
Then download and install the Mozilla Build Package 1.1
Download Mozilla Build Package 1.1
The package should install everything into c:\mozilla-build directory by default.
Once these two things are done, run the start-msvc8.bat in the c:\mozilla-build directory which will open up an application window with MINGW32 (referred to as MSYS).

STEP 2.
Now that the MSYS window is open (it will look something like command prompt), navigate your way back to the root c:\ - by default the application root for me was somewhere in my c:\document and settings\user\ which isn't allowed for the build procedure because of the spaces between the directory name.
Once you are in c:\ do the following in the MSYS console:

Make a new directory called proj.

mkdir proj

Navigate into proj directory.

cd proj

Open a connection with mozilla cvs server.

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co mozilla/client.mk

Navigate into the new mozilla directory that was created by the cvs.

cd mozilla

Download the source code from CVS. This might take a little while so be patient. It took me about 5-10 minutes.

make -f client.mk checkout MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser

*** You can easily change the MOZ_CO_PROJECT tag to download different projects or versions. Check out the mozilla dev site for more info or Click Here

STEP 3.
Once all the source code is downloaded. Create a ".mozconfig" file in the c:\proj\mozilla directory and fill it with your build options. Mine looked something like this:

# Options for client.mk.
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/obj-@CONFIG_GUESS@

# Options for 'configure' (same as command-line options).
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
ac_add_options --enable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-static
ac_add_options --disable-optimize

Once that is done type:
make -f client.mk build MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
This will build the source code. I would suggest you go do something else unless you have one of them top of the line PCs - this process took my about 90mins.

STEP 5.
Once the source code is built, hopefully with no errors, you should have a directory called "obj-i686-pc-mingw32" or something similar. Make sure any Firefox browsers are closed before continuing.
To run Minefield (Firefox 2 or 3?), run firefox located in c:\proj\mozilla\obj-i686-pc-mingw32\dist\bin

After a minute or two you should have a working build of Minefield.



If you would like to make an installer, you can type make installer in the c:\proj\mozilla\obj-i686-pc-mingw32 directory.

**NOTE: If Firefox is already running on your desktop running Minefield will only open a new window, so please close Firefox before running the application.

You are now COMPLETE!