tor-browser-build

Tor Browser Build
=================

Installing build dependencies
-----------------------------

To build Tor Browser, you need a Linux distribution that has support
for runc (such as Debian jessie, Ubuntu 16.04, Fedora 20, etc ...).
On Debian jessie, the runc package is available in backports. On Debian
stretch, the runc package is available in the main repository.

Your user account should have sudo access, which is required to be able
to extract container file systems, start containers and copy files to and
from containers.

The sources of most components are downloaded using git, which needs to
be installed. Some components are downloaded using mercurial which also
needs to be installed. The sources of webrtc are downloaded using
gclient, which requires GTK+ 2.0 development files and curl to be
installed.

You also need a few perl modules installed:
- YAML::XS
- File::Basename
- Getopt::Long
- Template
- IO::Handle
- IO::CaptureOutput
- JSON
- File::Temp
- Path::Tiny
- File::Path
- File::Copy::Recursive
- String::ShellQuote
- Sort::Versions
- Digest::SHA
- Data::UUID
- Data::Dump

If you are running Debian or Ubuntu, you can install them with:

# apt-get install libyaml-libyaml-perl libtemplate-perl \
libio-handle-util-perl libio-all-perl \
libio-captureoutput-perl libjson-perl libpath-tiny-perl \
libstring-shellquote-perl libsort-versions-perl \
libdigest-sha-perl libdata-uuid-perl libdata-dump-perl \
libfile-copy-recursive-perl git libgtk2.0-dev curl runc \
mercurial

The build system is based on rbm, which is included as a git submodule
in the rbm/ directory. You can fetch the rbm git submodule by running
'make submodule-update'.


Starting a build
----------------

To start a build, run one of the following commands, depending on the
channel you want to build:

$ make release
$ make alpha
$ make nightly
$ make alpha_nightly

You can find the build result in the directory release/unsigned/$version
or alpha/unsigned/$version for release or alpha builds. The result of
nightly or alpha_nightly can be found in the nightly/$date or
alpha_nightly/$date directory.

The alpha and alpha_nightly make target will build the same thing. The
only difference is the output directory. The alpha_nightly target can be
useful if you want to do a test build without polluting your alpha
directory.

If you want to build for a specific platform only, append the platform
name to the makefile target:

$ make nightly-linux-x86_64
$ make nightly-linux-i686
$ make nightly-linux-arm
$ make nightly-windows-i686
$ make nightly-osx-x86_64
$ make nightly-android-armv7

When you want to quickly do a build to test a change, you can use the
testbuild makefile target, and find the build in the testbuild directory.
The build will be the same as regular alpha builds, except that in order
to make the build faster, only the en-US locale will be built, and no
mar file will be created.


Updating git sources
--------------------

You can run "make fetch" to fetch the latest sources from git for all
components included in Tor Browser. You should run this if you want to
make a nightly build with the latest commits, and you disabled automatic
fetching of new commits for nightly builds in rbm.local.conf.


Number of make processes
------------------------

By default the builds are run with 4 processes simultaneously (with
make -j4). If you want to change the number of processes used, you can
set the RBM_NUM_PROCS environment variable:

$ export RBM_NUM_PROCS=8

You can also set the buildconf/num_procs option in rbm.local.conf.


Automated builds
----------------

If the build fails, a shell will automatically open in the build
container to help you debug the problem. You probably want to disable
this if you want to do automated builds. To disable this, set
the RBM_NO_DEBUG environment variable to 1:

export RBM_NO_DEBUG=1

Or set the debug option to 0 in the rbm.local.conf file.

If you want to select the output directory, you can use rbm's --output-dir
option. You can look at the Makefile to find the rbm command for what
you want to build, and add the --output-dir option. For example, if you
want to build Tor Browser nightly for linux-x86_64:

./rbm/rbm build release --output-dir=/var/builds/nightly/2017-01-23 \
--target nightly --target torbrowser-linux-x86_64

The files will be put in the directory selected by --output-dir in a
subdirectory named as the version number (or current date for nightly).
To remove this version subdirectory, add the noversiondir target:

./rbm/rbm build release --output-dir=/var/builds/nightly/2017-01-23 \
--target nightly --target torbrowser-linux-x86_64 \
--target noversiondir


Automated builds using tbb-testsuite
------------------------------------

The Tor Browser testsuite scripts can also be used to do nightly builds
and publish the build logs. The recommended way to do that is to use
the ansible roles from the tools/ansible directory. See next section
for details.


Using ansible to set up a nightly build machine
-----------------------------------------------

The directory tools/ansible contains some ansible roles to set up a
nightly build machine. You can look at the playbook defined in
boklm-tbb-nightly-build.yml and variables in group_vars/boklm-tbb-nightly/
for an example of how it can be used.


Signing builds
--------------

If the environment variable RBM_SIGN_BUILD is set to 1, the
sha256sums-unsigned-build.txt file will be signed with gpg.
You can use the RBM_GPG_OPTS environment variable to add some options
to the gpg command used to sign the file. You can also set the
var/sign_build and var/sign_build_gpg_opts options in the rbm.local.conf
file.


Cleaning obsolete files and containers images
---------------------------------------------

You can run 'make clean' to clean old build files and containers that
are no longer used in current builds. Before doing that, you need to
configure the branches and build targets you are using in the
rbm.local.conf file. The cleaning script will check out all the configured
branches to create a list of used build files, and delete the files
from the 'out' directory that are not used. If you want to see the list
of files and containers that would be removed without doing it, you can
use 'make clean-dry-run'.


Common Build Errors
-------------------

You can look at the README.BUILD_ERRORS file for a list of common build
errors and their solutions.


Hacking on the Tor Browser build
--------------------------------

The file README.HACKING tries to list the main things to know when
making changes to the Tor Browser build.

Description of makefile rules
-----------------------------

You can find a description of the makefile rules in the README.MAKEFILE
file.