Building and Installing Emacs from the Repository The Emacs repository is hosted on Savannah. The following Git command will clone the repository to the 'emacs' subdirectory of the current directory on your local machine: git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git To build the repository code, simply run 'make' in the 'emacs' directory. This should work if your files are freshly checked out from the repository, and if you have the proper tools installed. If it doesn't work, or if you have special build requirements, the following information may be helpful. Building Emacs from the source-code repository requires some tools that are not needed when building from a release. You will need: autoconf - at least the version specified near the start of configure.ac (in the AC_PREREQ command). git - at least Git 1.7.1. If your repository was created by an older Git version, you may need to reclone it. makeinfo - not strictly necessary, but highly recommended, so that you can build the manuals. GNU Texinfo 4.13 or later should work. To use the autotools, run the following shell command to generate the 'configure' script and some related files, and to set up your git configuration: $ ./autogen.sh You can then configure your build as follows: $ ./configure The 'configure' script has many options; run './configure --help' to see them. For example, if you want later builds to go faster, albeit sometimes doing the wrong thing if you update the build procedure, you can invoke './configure -C'. After configuring, build Emacs as follows: $ make You can also type 'make check' to test and 'make install' to install Emacs. Occasionally the file 'lisp/loaddefs.el' (and similar automatically generated files, such as 'esh-groups.el', and '*-loaddefs.el' in some subdirectories of 'lisp/', e.g., 'mh-e/' and 'calendar/') will need to be updated to reflect new autoloaded functions. If you see errors (rather than warnings) about undefined lisp functions during compilation, that may be the reason. Finally, sometimes there can be build failures related to '*loaddefs.el' (e.g., "required feature ‘esh-groups’ was not provided"). In that case, follow the instructions below. To update loaddefs.el (and similar files), do: $ cd lisp $ make autoloads If either of the above partial procedures fails, try 'make bootstrap'. If CPU time is not an issue, 'make bootstrap' is a more thorough way to rebuild, avoiding spurious problems. Occasionally, there are changes that 'make bootstrap' won't be able to handle. The most thorough cleaning can be achieved by 'git clean -fdx' which will leave you with only files from the git repository. Here are some faster methods for a couple of particular error cases: /usr/bin/m4:aclocal.m4:9: cannot open `m4/count-leading-zeros.m4': No such file or directory This can be fixed with 'rm aclocal.m4'. make: *** No rule to make target 'lib/Makefile.am', needed by 'lib/Makefile.in' This can be fixed with 'rm lib/Makefile Makefile'. Because the repository version of Emacs is a work in progress, it will sometimes fail to build. Please wait a day or so (and check the archives of the emacs-buildstatus, emacs-devel, and bug-gnu-emacs mailing lists) before reporting such problems. In most cases, the problem is known about and is just waiting for someone to fix it. This is especially true for Lisp compilation errors, which are almost never platform-specific. Copyright (C) 2002-2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs. If not, see .