These are instructions on how to build the app on desktop platforms. See the readme for help build building on other platforms.
These instructions are probably not complete. If you find something more that needs installing on your platform please submit an issue or a pull request.
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Get the latest stable Rust toolchain via rustup.rs.
-
You need Node.js and npm. You can find the exact versions in the
volta
section ofgui/package.json
. The toolchain is managed by volta.-
Linux & macOS
cargo install --git https://github.com/volta-cli/volta && volta setup
-
Windows
Install the
msi
hosted here: https://github.com/volta-cli/volta
-
-
(Not Windows) Install Go (ideally version
1.21
) by following the official instructions. Newer versions may work too. -
Install a protobuf compiler (version 3.15 and up), it can be installed on most major Linux distros via the package name
protobuf-compiler
,protobuf
on macOS via Homebrew, and on Windows binaries are available on their GitHub page and they have to be put in%PATH
. An additional package might also be required depending on Linux distro:protobuf-devel
on Fedora.libprotobuf-dev
on Debian/Ubuntu.
# For building the daemon
sudo apt install gcc libdbus-1-dev
# For building the installer
sudo apt install rpm
# For building the daemon
sudo dnf install dbus-devel
# For building the installer
sudo dnf install rpm-build
By default, the app will build for the host platform. It is also possible to cross-compile the app for ARM64 on x64.
# As root
dpkg --add-architecture arm64 && \
apt update && \
apt install libdbus-1-dev:arm64 gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu
rustup target add aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
To make sure the right linker and libraries are used, add the following to ~/.cargo/config.toml
:
[target.aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu]
linker = "aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc"
[target.aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.dbus]
rustc-link-search = ["/usr/aarch64-linux-gnu/lib"]
rustc-link-lib = ["dbus-1"]
The host has to have the following installed:
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Microsoft's Build Tools for Visual Studio 2022 (a regular installation of Visual Studio 2022 Community or Pro edition works as well).
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Windows 10 (or Windows 11) SDK.
-
msbuild.exe
available in%PATH%
. If you installed Visual Studio Community edition, the binary can be found under:C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\MSBuild\Current\Bin\amd64
-
bash
installed as well as a few base unix utilities, includingsed
andtail
. You are recommended to use Git for Windows. -
The
x86
target is required for building some NSIS plugins:rustup target add i686-pc-windows-msvc
The host has to have the following installed:
-
A recent version of
bash
. The default version in macOS (3.2.57) isn't supported. -
clang
is required for CGo.
The simplest way to build the entire app and generate an installer is to just run the build script.
--optimize
can be added to enable compiler optimizations. This will take longer to build but will
produce a smaller installer and installed binaries:
./build.sh [--optimize]
This should produce an installer exe, pkg or rpm+deb file in the dist/
directory.
Building this requires at least 1GB of memory.
By default, build.sh
produces a pkg for your current architecture only. To build a universal
app that works on both Intel and Apple Silicon macs, build with --universal
.
To cross-compile for ARM64 rather than the current architecture, set the TARGETS
environment
variable to aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
:
TARGETS="aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu" ./build.sh
Due to inability to build the management interface proto files on ARM64 (see this issue), building on ARM64 must be done in 2 stages:
- Build management interface proto files on another platform than arm64 Linux
- Use the built proto files during the main build by setting the
MANAGEMENT_INTERFACE_PROTO_BUILD_DIR
environment variable to the path the proto files
To build the management interface proto files there is a script (execute it on another platform than ARM64 Linux):
cd gui/scripts
npm ci
./build-proto.sh
After that copy the files from gui/src/main/management_interface/
and
gui/build/src/main/management_interface/
directories into a single directory, and set the value
of MANAGEMENT_INTERFACE_PROTO_BUILD_DIR
to that directory while running the main build.
When all is done run the main build. Assuming that you copied the proto files into /tmp/management_interface_proto
directory, the build command will look as follows:
MANAGEMENT_INTERFACE_PROTO_BUILD_DIR=/tmp/management_interface_proto ./build.sh --dev-build
On Linux, you may also have to specify USE_SYSTEM_FPM=true
to generate the deb/rpm packages.
This section is for building the system service individually.
-
Source
env.sh
to set the default environment variables:source env.sh
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On Windows, build the C++ libraries:
./build-windows-modules.sh
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Build the system daemon plus the other Rust tools and programs:
cargo build
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Copy the OpenVPN binaries, and our plugin for it, to the directory we will use as resource directory. If you want to use any other directory, you would need to copy even more files.
cp dist-assets/binaries/<platform>/openvpn[.exe] dist-assets/ cp target/debug/*talpid_openvpn_plugin* dist-assets/ cp dist-assets/binaries/x86_64-pc-windows-msvc/wintun.dll target/debug/
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On Windows, the daemon must be run as the SYSTEM user. You can use PsExec to launch an elevated bash instance before starting the daemon in it:
psexec64 -i -s bash.exe
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Run the daemon with verbose logging (from the root directory of the project):
sudo MULLVAD_RESOURCE_DIR="./dist-assets" ./target/debug/mullvad-daemon -vv
Leave out
sudo
on Windows. The daemon must run as root since it modifies the firewall and sets up virtual network interfaces etc.
This section is for building the GUI app individually.
-
Go to the
gui
directorycd gui
-
Install all the JavaScript dependencies by running:
npm install
-
Start the GUI in development mode by running:
npm run develop
If you change any javascript file while the development mode is running it will automatically transpile and reload the file so that the changes are visible almost immediately.
Please note that the GUI needs a running daemon to connect to in order to work. See Building and running mullvad-daemon for instructions on how to do that before starting the GUI.