getting-started.md

Welcome to the Jetpack SDK.

Prerequisites

To develop with the new Jetpack SDK, you'll need:

• Python 2.5 or greater.

• A working version of Firefox, Thunderbird, or the XULRunner SDK that uses Gecko 1.9.2 or later (e.g., Firefox 3.6).

• If you're on Windows, you'll also need [Python for Windows extensions] pywin32, though we'll be removing this dependency soon (see bug 542000).

Installation

At the time of this writing, the latest stable version of the Jetpack SDK is 0.1. You can obtain it as a tarball or a zip file.

Alternatively, you can get the latest development version of the Jetpack SDK from its HG repository.

Regardless of which option you choose, simply enter the root directory of your checkout with a shell/command prompt. This directory should be called jetpack-sdk.

Unlike many development tools, there isn't a system-wide location for the Jetpack SDK. Instead, developers can have as many installations of the SDK as they want, each configured separately from one another. Each installation is called a *virtual environment*.

Then, if you're on Linux, OS X, or another Unix-based system, run:

source bin/activate

Otherwise, if you're on Windows, run:

bin/activate

Now the beginning of your command prompt should contain the text (jetpack-sdk), which means that your shell has entered a special virtual environment that gives you access to the Jetpack SDK's command-line tools.

At any time, you can leave a virtual environment by running deactivate.

Sanity Check

Unit and behavioral [testing] is something that we're trying to make as easy and fast as possible in the Jetpack SDK, because it's imperative that we know when breakages occur between the Mozilla platform and Jetpack. We also need to make sure that creating new functionality or modifying existing code doesn't break other things.

Run this at your shell prompt:

cfx testall

This should produce output that looks something like this:

Testing all available packages: test-harness, jetpack-core.

...........................................................
...........................................................
............................................

Malloc bytes allocated (in use by application): 8872960
Malloc bytes mapped (not necessarily committed): 17653760
Malloc bytes committed (r/w) in default zone: 8882512
Malloc bytes allocated (in use) in default zone: 16605184
Tracked memory objects in testing sandbox: 2

162 of 162 tests passed.
OK
Total time: 1.511243 seconds
Program terminated successfully.

Note: If you're on Windows, you may need to add the --no-quit option to cfx to prevent the above output from disappearing instantly.

Note: By default, running cfx with no special options will attempt to find Firefox in its most common location on your system and use it to perform the action you requested. If you have multiple versions of Firefox on your system, however, or if you want to use Thunderbird or the XULRunner SDK, then you may have to use cfx's --app and/or --binary command-line options. Run cfx --help for more information on this.

Once you're ready, move on to the next section: Packaging.