Required Software
- Firefox 1.5 or later
- Apache Maven 2
Building
Check out the latest code form Subversion.
svn co http://svn.openqa.org/svn/selenium-ide/trunk/src selenium-ide
Move to the directory checked out, and run
mvn package
You'll get selenium-ide.xpi under the target directory, and you'll be able to install the extension by dropping it into your Firefox.
Debugging the extension
If you'd like to modify Selenium IDE, it would be a pain to build and install the extension every time when you change the code. In that case, you can make your extension run directly under your source directory to skip the build and installation process of the extension.
First, open your profile folder. Create a file called user.js, and add the following lines to this file. You can also set these values by entering "about:config" in the address bar.
user_pref("javascript.options.showInConsole", true); user_pref("nglayout.debug.disable_xul_cache", true);
This will let the errors from the extension shown in JavaScript console, and disable XUL cache to let you debug the code without restarting Firefox.
After that, create a file called {a6fd85ed-e919-4a43-a5af-8da18bda539f} (including braces!) under the extensions directory in your profile folder. This magic number is a GUID of Selenium IDE. If you already have a directory with same name, delete it. In this file, write a single line containing the absolute path to your Selenium IDE source. (e.g. /Users/shinya/work/openqa/selenium-ide)
Also, if there is a file called compreg.dat in your profile folder, delete it. This is a kind of cache for registered components, and since Selenium IDE includes a component, you have to delete it once to make sure the component is registered.
That's all.
Start Firefox with your desired profile and you'll find the extension working.
This way, the source code will be reloaded most of the time just by reopening Selenium IDE window.
Note that after you have checked out Selenium IDE, you'll need to run maven at least once to import Selenium source.
References
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Building_an_Extension
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Setting_up_extension_development_environment