Building on MacOS

Installing the required dependencies

You will require the following to be installed to follow this guide:

• NodeJS and NPM
• Yarn package manager

You can install all of these via Brew:

brew install node yarn

Cloning the source code

You will need to clone the source code recursively to download the sub-modules this project depends upon.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser
cd browser

Building and linking Gluon

We have a custom build tool for building Firefox forks called Gluon. Whilst it is available on NPM, we use a bleeding edge version, so we have to build it before using it:

yarn
yarn setupLink

Downloading the Firefox source code

The next step is to download the Firefox source code and any addons that we might chose to bundle with the browser.

yarn download

This will take around 5 minutes if you have a decent internet connection and processor.

Importing changes

Right now, we just have a vanilla version of Firefox. To make it Pulse, we need to apply a number of custom changes. To do this run:

yarn imp

Note We use yarn imp instead of yarn import to avoid conflicts with internal yarn commands

Building

Now for the long part, we need to build Firefox. You can do this by running the following command:

yarn build

Note This takes ~50 minutes for the first build on our developers computers. This will drop down to between 2 and 5 minutes after the first build or ~30 seconds when using yarn build:ui (only available in some circumstances).

Starting the browser

You can start the browser after a build using the following command:

yarn start

Packaging

You can package the browser for release by running the following command:

yarn package