Building from source

Peppermint is built with Surfer on top of the Firefox source tree. A first build downloads a lot of source and takes a while.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20.10.0 or later
• Python 3.11 or later
• Rust 1.78 or later (for the ffprefs tool)
• Git with LFS support
• Platform build tools:
  • Windows: Visual Studio 2022 and the Windows 10 SDK
  • macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools
  • Linux: build-essential, pkg-config, gtk3-devel, libasound2-dev

One-command setup

# Clone with submodules
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/AstroDevCompany/desktop.git peppermint
cd peppermint

# Guided first build (macOS or Linux)
./scripts/run-macos.sh

# Or on Windows
.\scripts\run-windows.ps1

Manual build

# Install dependencies
npm ci

# Download the Firefox source and apply patches
npm run init

# Development build (fast, unoptimised)
npm run build:ui

# Production build (optimised, PGO)
npm run build

# Run from source
npm start