Generate environments for building firefox in isolation from the system.
This repository contain a simple file which can be used to build Firefox out of the sources, or to make a build environment that can be used for building firefox.
To generate the build environments you will have to install Nix (https://nixos.org/nix). Even if Nix can be installed in user-space, it is recommended to install Nix as a system administrator, to benefit from the pre-compiled binaries.
A build environment can easily be generate for you for different architectures, such as i686-linux and x86_64-linux. These are used to specify the platform used for the tool chain. Using i686-linux will build a 32bits toolchain, while using x86_64-linx will build a 64bits toolchain.
Then, for each architecture, you can choose different compilers, such as gcc49, gcc48, gcc472 — which is used for linux slaves on treeherder — or clang35. (see the content of release.nix file for a complete list of supported compilers)
These are specified on the command line of the nix-shell tool which is installed with the latest versions of Nix.
The nix-shell tool is used to evaluate the expression and build the toolchain that you requested. The first time you use this command, it will pull binaries and build the dependencies which are not available on a remote server. The second time, it will reuse the tool chain that it produced before.
The following nix-shell command will build a 64bits toolchain with gcc 4.7.2. The --pure argument is optional, and it reset your environment to avoid having environment pollution while building. In addition, you can use the --command <cmd> to execute shell commands directly within this environment.
$ nix-shell ./firefox-build-env/release.nix -A build.x86_64-linux.gcc472 --pure
nix-shell$ cd ./mozilla-central
nix-shell$ ./mach build
nix-shell$ ./mach run
nix-shell$ exit
In addition to the above, you can use the nix-build tool to build the source of Firefox with the specified tool chain. Warning, that this command will make a copy of the source before doing the compilation.
You will have to specify on the command line the path to use to find the source with the --arg gecko <path> argument. The -o <result> is used to write a symlink on <result> which contains the installation directory of Firefox.
$ nix-build ./firefox-build-env/release.nix -A build.x86_64-linux.gcc472 --arg gecko ./mozilla-inbound -o firefox-x64-gcc472