How to contribute to Firefox¶
The goal of this doc is to have a place where all simple commands are listed from start to end.
This aims to be a simple tutorial for lazy copy and paste.
Each section in this tutorial links to more detailed documentation on the topic.
The whole process is a bit long, it will take time to get things right. If at any point you are stuck, please don’t feel shy to ask on IRC at irc.mozilla.org in #introduction channel.
Clone the sources¶
You can use either mercurial or git. Mercurial is the canonical version control system.
$ hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/
For git, see the git cinnabar documentation
The clone should be around 30 minutes (depending on your connection) and the repository should be less than 5GB (~ 20GB after the build).
Install dependencies¶
Firefox provides a mechanism to install all dependencies; in the source tree:
$ ./mach bootstrap
The default options are recommended. Select “Artifact Mode” if you are not planning to write C++ or Rust code.
Windows dependencies¶
You need 64-bit version of Windows 7 or later.
Download and install Visual Studio.
Finally download the MozillaBuild Package. Installation directory should be:
$ c:\mozilla-build\
To build & run¶
Once all the dependencies have been installed, run:
$ ./mach build
which will check for dependencies and start the build. This will take a while; a few minutes to a few hours depending on your hardware.
To run it:
$ ./mach run
To write a patch¶
Make the changes you need in the code base.
Then:
# Mercurial
$ hg commit
# Git
$ git commit
The commit message should look like:
Bug xxxx - Short description of your change. r?reviewer
Optionally, a longer description of the change.
To find a reviewer, the easiest way is to do hg log <modified-file> (or
git log <modified-file>, if you’re using git) on the relevant files, and
look who usually is reviewing the actual changes (ie not reformat, renaming
of variables, etc).
To visualize your patch in the repository, run:
# Mercurial
$ hg wip
# Git
$ git show
To test a change locally¶
To run the tests, use mach test with the path. However, it isn’t always easy to parse the results.
$ ./mach test dom/serviceworkers
To test a change remotely¶
Running all the tests for Firefox takes a very long time and requires multiple operating systems with various configurations. To build Firefox and run its tests on continuous integration servers (CI), two commands are available:
$ ./mach try chooser
To select jobs running a fuzzy search:
$ ./mach try fuzzy
From Treeherder, it is also possible to attach new jobs. As every review has a try CI run associated, it makes this work easier. See Attaching new jobs from a review for more information.
Note
This requires level 1 commit access.
You can ask your reviewer to submit the patch for you if you don’t have that level of access.
To submit a patch¶
To submit a patch for review, we use a tool called moz-phab.
$ moz-phab
It will publish all the currently applied patches to Phabricator and inform the reviewer.
If you wrote several patches on top of each other:
$ moz-phab submit <first_revision>::<last_revision>
To update a submitted patch¶
It is rare that a reviewer will accept the first version of patch. Moreover, as the code review bot might suggest some improvements, changes to your patch may be required.
Run:
# Mercurial
$ hg commit --amend
# Git
$ git commit --amend
After amending the patch, you will need to submit it using moz-phab again.
If you wrote many changes, you can squash or edit commits with the command:
# Mercurial
$ hg histedit
# Git
$ git rebase -i
The submission step is the same as for the initial patch.
Retrieve new changes from the repository¶
To pull changes from the repository, run:
# Mercurial
$ hg pull --rebase
# Git
$ git pull --rebase
To push a change in the code base¶
Once the change has been accepted, ask the reviewer if they could land the change. They don’t have an easy way to know if a contributor has permission to land it or not.
If the reviewer does not land the patch after a few days, add the Check-in Needed Tags to the review (Edit Revision).
The landing procedure will automatically close the review and the bug.