To build Tor Messenger, you need a Linux distribution that has support for runc (such as Debian jessie, Ubuntu 16.04, Fedora 20, etc ...).
On Debian jessie, the runc package is available in backports. On Debian stretch, the runc package is available in the main repository. Version 0.1.1 of runc is required (which is the version available in Debian stretch and jessie-backports). It is not yet working with runc version 1.0.0: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23039
Your user account should have access sudo access, which is required to be able to extract container file systems, start containers and copy files to and from containers.
The sources are downloaded using git and mercurial which need to be installed.
If you are running Debian or Ubuntu, you can install the build dependencies with the following command:
# apt-get install libyaml-libyaml-perl libtemplate-perl \
libio-handle-util-perl libio-all-perl \
libio-captureoutput-perl libfile-slurp-perl \
libstring-shellquote-perl libsort-versions-perl \
libdigest-sha-perl libdata-uuid-perl libdata-dump-perl \
libfile-copy-recursive-perl git libgtk2.0-dev curl runc \
mercurial zip
To start a build, simply run make all in the directory to build all
currently supported architectures.
If you want to build only one architecture, you can run something like
make tor-messenger-linux-x86_64.
The resulting builds are stored in the out/tor-messenger directory.
You can also run make tor-messenger-release to build it for all
architectures, rename files to their final name and generate an
sha256sums.txt file in the directory release/$version.
You can run make fetch to fetch the latest sources from git and
mercurial for all components included in Tor Messenger.
To clean obsolete files and containers images, you can run make clean-old.
This command will remove any intermediate build files and containers that are no longer used in the current builds. Because it needs to compute the filename of all current files, this command takes a lot of time to run.