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Getting started

You will need both B2G and Gaia to begin development. This guide assumes your system is either Mac or Linux.

Setup for working with B2G Desktop

While you can build B2G yourself (and you need to if you wish to flash a device with it), it's preferable to get started with the Desktop build. Also, it's much easier to work with. You can download an already built Desktop build for your specific operating system.

b2g-bin is the executable you want. In linux, it's simply whereever you extracted the nightly file. In MacOS, it's in /Applications/B2G.app/Contents/MacOS/b2g-bin. Do yourself a favor and add that to your $PATH - either in your .bashrc or .bash_profile depending on your setup. Linux users, too. If you don't know how to do this, google "linux add to PATH" or "osx add to PATH". On OSX I had to add the directory to my Path, not b2g-bin itself. Moving foward, this document will assume you've done this. If you haven't, you can replace b2g-bin with the full path.

So, now, you should be able to run b2g-bin and see a small, black window appear. You might even see B2G boot up, because it comes with an older version of gaia. But you want the latest gaia - see the next section for more on this.

Linux systems

Get the zip for your OS. We recommend developing with it adjacent to your gaia git clone. Which means your directory structure would look like this:

yourprojectdirectory/
  |-- gaia
  |-- b2g-nightly
      |-- # contents of zip file
      |-- b2g-bin
      |-- etc

MacOS

This is similar, except the dmg comes as an app. Once you've mounted the dmg, you can drag it to your Applications folder.

To build Gaia on OSX, you'll need to install XCode then go to the preferences and install the Command Line Tools component.

Building Gaia

Clone gaia somewhere sensible

git clone git://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia.git

While Gaia is mostly HTML/CSS/JavaScript, there are still manifest files and configuration files that need to be built for XUL. To do this, simply type make in the root of the gaia directory. This will setup XUL and process gaia --namely all the apps in the apps folder. This creates a profile folder, which is the build version of gaia.

To launch b2g-bin with your newly created profile, simply tell b2g-bin about it.

b2g-bin -profile /path/to/gaia/profile

Note: b2g-bin requires that the path you give it to profile be a complete one. That means either one based off of the root of the drive like /path/to/gaia or based off of your home folder ~/path/to/gaia. A path like ../gaia/profile will fail.

So this should load B2G and start your profile for the first time. You'll probably get the welcoming questions like language and time-zone, as well as an optional tour. After that, you're in. Some tips for navigating in B2G desktop:

+-------------------+-------------------------+---------------+
| Button            | Window/Linux            | Mac           |
+-------------------+-------------------------+---------------+
| Home              | Home key                | fn + ←        |
| Power             | End                     | fn + →        |
| Volume            | Page Up/Page Down       | fn + ↑/↓      |
| Open Cards View   | Long press to Home Key  | cmd + fn + ←  |
+-------------------+-------------------------+---------------+

(source: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Hacking#Simulating_Hardware_Buttons)

b2g vs. b2g-bin

The b2g executable uses the default profile that ships with Boot 2 Gecko itself. This makes it unsuitable for Gaia development. The b2g-bin executable uses the profile specified on the command line (see above).

(source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/Using_the_B2G_desktop_client#Running_on_Linux)