Building Tor Browser

Support Tor Browser Desktop
1

I’m interested in building Tor Browser on my local machine. I have set up my dev environment according to your wiki (my local machine runs on Debian bookworm, so it is straightforward) and forked the repo. In Releases and Branches the wiki explains the naming convention you use for branches - clear enough. However, I cannot see branch names for either the latest stable or alpha release (13.5.2 and 14.0.a1). Which branch do I check out to duplicate the build for either of these releases? Many thanks.

2

Hi Noino,

I suspect the issue you’re running into is confusion between our two separate repos:

  • tor-browser : our firefox fork, contains all of the tor-browser patches which are applied to firefox desktop and android (starting with the 14.0 series)
  • tor-browser-build : our cross-compiled build system for releases which consumes the tor-browser repo, among many others

The tor-browser branches have tags like tor-browser-128.0.0esr-14.0-1-build1 (ESR 128.0 based Tor Browser 14.0 series), where as the tor-browser-build branches has tags like tbb-14.0a1-build1 (specifically the build configuration used for Tor Browser 14.0a1).

You can build a local dev-build for your host operating system using the tor-browser repo following the docs here:

This will give you a local dev deployment for testing changes

You can do a FULL build for any of our supported operating systems using the tor-browser-build repo

For day-to-day development, you probably want a local dev-build (unless you are working on an issue for another operating system, i.e. if your host OS is debian but you are fixing a Windows bug). Incremental builds are supported with dev-builds (i.e. after an initial full build, only your changes need to be rebuilt) whereas tor-browser-build builds are always full builds AND you need to build a ton of tools, libraries, compilers, etc the first time. It can take a day or two to build all these artifacts starting fresh depending on your PC.

If you run into an issues, feel free to come find us in #tor-browser-dev on OFTC IRC: How can I chat with Tor Project teams? | Tor Project | Support

3 Likes
3

@morgan many thanks, I was indeed confused between the 2 repos.

1 Like
4

This topic was automatically closed 24 hours after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.