Configuring a development environment for mozilla projects is a pretty straightforward operation now with the recent releases of Eclipse-CDT. This tutorial explains how to edit a Mozilla project from it's sources within the Eclipse IDE. For convenience, the Firefox project is used as a sample

Requirements

Applications and Libraries

The Ubuntu repositories contain Eclipse version 3.2.2 and Eclipse-CDT 3.1.2. You might want to download these directly from Eclipse's download page

 #sudo apt-get install eclipse eclipse-cdt libcurl4-openssl-dev
 #sudo apt-get build-dep firefox

Sources

Make sure you've retrieved your Mozilla project sources and configured your .mozconfig file (see the documentation). Here is an example of a .mozconfig used to build a debug version of Firefox.

 mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/../obj-@CONFIG_GUESS@
 ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
 mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
 ac_add_options --enable-debug
 ac_add_options --disable-optimize

The Eclipse Project

Create the Project

 File->New->Project…
 C/C++ Project->Standard Make C++ Project
 Project Name: Firefox (can be anything)
 Location : (select the Mozilla root folder)
 Click Finish

Configure the Project

 Right-click on the new Firefox project in Eclipse’s left column
 Click Properties
 Select Make C++ Project
 Change Build command to make -f client.mk
 Change Build (incremental build) from all to build

Troubleshooting

1. In case your Eclipse IDE is slow, make sure that the Project->Build Automatically option is turned off. Mozilla projects have a considerable size and the make compiler has to parse every subfolder when a change occurs. This is a painful operation while developing.

Other Links

1. Distributed Compilation with distcc

2. Debugging Mozilla Projects with Eclipse-CDT and GDB

CategoryMozillaTeam