So you want to build the Titanium Mobile SDK from source

This is a quick, very quick, blog entry about building Titanium Mobile from source. No hand-holding or fancy screenshots.

1. Get the sources from Github. You can use git if you want or just download the sources. For the latter, see the “Download Source” link near the upper-right of the Github page.
2. Make sure you have Python 2.6 or higher on your system. If you don’t, you go figure out how to install it! Maybe 2.5 is okay — I’m not going to go check. What I can tell you is that 2.6 works.
3. Make sure you have Scons 1.3 installed. And make the “scons” script accessible via your PATH so you can call it from anywhere.
4. Make sure you have the Sun (Oracle) Java JDK 6 installed. You may also need to set your JAVA_HOME properly and you should also put JDK’s bin folder in your PATH. You can figure all that out on your own!

When all that’s finished, go the source folder where you put the Titanium Mobile sources (the folder with the SConstruct file in it) and enter the “scons” command.

When it’s done building, copy the resulting mobilesdk-x.x.x-[os].zip in the “dist/” folder to your local Titanium SDK installation folder. The location of that folder depends on your OS. On my Mac it’s “/Library/Application Support/Titanium”. On my Ubuntu box it’s under ~/.titanium. On my Windows XP box it’s under “c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\titanium”. (God I hate Windows XP.) If you can’t find your location, try searching your file system for a folder named “Titanium”. It’s the folder that has “mobilesdk” as a subfolder.

Unzip the ZIP there.

You should be ready to go. Next time you use the Titanium Developer, you should see the newer SDK available as one of the options next to “Titanium SDK” on your mobile project’s properties screen.

Did I forget anything?