"New Mozilla Application" Template

If you want to use Mozilla's build system to create a new application, with compiled code and/or tests, you should start here. This is a template for the absolute minimum code you need for starting a new application source tree in mozilla-central.

As such, you should expect to do a few string replacements. Run create-application.py to create and configure your new project.

This project is very much a work in progress. DO NOT USE YET!!

Building

First, create a folder to house your application for development:

mkdir newapp-cleandir
cd newapp-cleandir

Then clone the firefox source code, either via git clone or hg clone:

hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/
# Alternatively (might be faster):
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev mozilla-central

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/ajvincent/motherhen gh-newapp

Keep track of the location of mozilla-central:

echo $PWD/mozilla-central > gh-newapp/.moz-central

Now, we need to add our app to the gecko source code:

# On linux add -r to each of the following commands
ln -s gh-newapp/boilerplate mozilla-central/newapp
ln -s gh-newapp/newapp-sym.mozconfig mozilla-central/.mozconfig

Apply custom patches:

cd gh-newapp
./patches.sh import
cd ..

Configure and build your application:

cd mozilla-central
./mach configure
./mach build

Then run it:

./mach run