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 14.04, Fedora 20, etc ...). On Debian jessie, the runc package is available in backports.

Your user account should have access 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. 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
File::Temp
File::Slurp
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 libfile-slurp-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

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-windows-i686 $ make nightly-osx-x86_64

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.

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.

If you want to do that, start by cloning the git repository:

$ git clone https://git.torproject.org/boklm/tor-browser-bundle-testsuite.git

Install some dependencies:

apt-get install -y libdata-dump-perl libfile-slurp-perl \

           libio-captureoutput-perl perlmagick libjson-perl \
           libwww-perl liblwp-protocol-https-perl libtemplate-perl \
           libyaml-syck-perl libdatetime-perl \
           libemail-sender-perl libemail-simple-perl libfile-type-perl \
           libipc-run-perl libxml-libxml-perl

Copy the config/tor-browser_build-boklm file and edit it:

$ cd tor-browser-bundle-testsuite $ cp config/tor-browser_build-boklm config/tor-browser_build-$user $ vim config/tor-browser_build-$user

Change the publish_dir and publish_url options. The publish_dir option is the local directory where the builds will be stored. The publish_url option is the public URL where the builds will be available.

Copy the tools/tor-browser-builds-boklm file and edit it to change the --config= option:

$ cp tools/tor-browser-builds-boklm tools/tor-browser-builds-$user $ vim tools/tor-browser-builds-$user

You can now run ./tools/tor-browser-builds-$user to start the build, and add it to you crontab.

The html build reports will be available in the reports/ directory, and the build files in the tor-browser-builds/ directory (unless you changed the publish_dir option).

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 checkout 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.

arthuredelstein / tor-browser-build

readme