[community] Building Tor Browser

[Georg Koppen]

Rishabh Raj:
> Hello,
> I am actually working on modifying some parts of Tor Browser for my project
> and for that I will need to build Tor Browser's source code. I was
> following this website
> <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorBrowser/Hacking> and
> after cloning tor-browser-build repo, I did a make nightly-linux-x86_64,
> which took almost half a day to complete on my Ubuntu 18.04 system. But,
> since I would be making some changes to the browser (mostly Firefox code),
> I need to alter code and build again and again.

Yes, the first time it takes quite some time as it builds all the
compilers and whatnot. But after that's done just the changing parts
should get rebuilt which takes significantly less time. Still, depending
on your development workflow and the area of your patch this might be
less than optimal. If you are interested in testing your patch with the
tor-browser-build workflow there is the README.HACKING doc that explains
how to patch Firefox (or any other component really).

We have patches up for review for a while now that would allow an
incremental dev workflow but have not found the time to look at them yet. :(

> In the above website, there is an option for '*Building Just Firefox*' and
> I decided to try that. As per the above website/doc, I cloned tor-browser
> repo and followed the instructions. First, the command
> 
> make $CONFIGURE_ARGS -f client.mk configure
> CONFIGURE_ARGS="--with-tor-browser-version=tbb-nightly
> --with-distribution-id=org.torproject --enable-update-channel=default
> --enable-bundled-fonts"
> 
> gave me :
> 
> client.mk:40: /.mozconfig-client-mk: No such file or directory
> 
> client.mk:72: *** client.mk must be used via mach. Try running ./mach
> configure. Stop.
> 
> ./mach configure was not working as well, but using this webpage
> <https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/36f4ba2fb6f5>, I patched
> the *init.configure* file and it worked. But now when I run ./mach build,
> it finally gives (after doing a lot of compilation):

What error do you get (your mail did not tell)?

But, yes, we need to update that website (it's a wiki, you could do it
as well!) but have not gotten around that yet. That said, |./mach
configure| should work without any patching. I just tested that and
updated the wiki accordingly (note: since a couple of days you need to
copy over tor-launcher sources as well before starting to configure)

> 
> 
> So could anyone please guide me as to how should I go about doing this.
> Basically as I had said in the beginning, I just want to modify and rebuild
> to test the new code that I would be introducing. Kindly help me out.

Let me know if any of the above does not work for you and sorry for the
inconvenience.

Georg

Note: The tbb-dev mailing list would probably have been a better venue
for that question, but I realize that our forest of mailing lists could
be hard to navigate. :)

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