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.

• 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 of gui/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:

• Microsoft's Build Tools for Visual Studio 2022 (a regular installation of Visual Studio 2022 Community or Pro edition works as well).

• 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, including sed and tail. 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:

1. Build management interface proto files on another platform than arm64 Linux
2. 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.

1. Source env.sh to set the default environment variables:

   source env.sh

2. On Windows, build the C++ libraries:

   ./build-windows-modules.sh

3. Build the system daemon plus the other Rust tools and programs:

   cargo build

4. 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/

5. 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
   

6. 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.

1. Go to the gui directory

   cd gui

2. Install all the JavaScript dependencies by running:

   npm install

3. 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.