5 Building and Testing Locally

Devin Lin edited this page 2025-07-31 15:10:17 -04:00

Table of Contents

• Setting up kde-builder
• Building the shell
• Running the shell in a window

Contributors will want to set up an environment to be able to build and test the Plasma projects locally on their machine.

Rolling release distributions are preferred development environments because they have more up-to-date packages, preventing the pain of trying to find newer versions of them if necessary.

It is highly recommended to use the kde-builder utility to build and test KDE projects. This is because it can handle building the entire Plasma stack, which may be necessary if the current master branch depends on unreleased changes from it (and so will not work with your system Plasma version).

Setting up kde-builder

Please go through this page first for instructions on setting up kde-builder.

We can setup the kde folder in your home directory for KDE development:

mkdir -p ~/kde/src
cd ~/kde/src/

We now have the utility setup to build KDE projects! For example, if we wanted to build the KWeather project, we can simply do:

# Build KWeather and its dependencies
kde-builder kweather

# Run the application
source ~/kde/build/kweather/prefix.sh
kweather

We can also specify some flags:

• --no-src builds local changes from ~/kde/src, rather than fetching the source code from GitLab
• --no-include-dependencies skips building all of the dependencies, and just solely builds the specified repository

So kde-builder kweather --no-src --no-include-depencencies skips building dependencies and builds the project from the existing code in ~/kde/src/kweather. See the manual for more information.

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konqi is preparing to build the shell...

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Building the shell

To build the Plasma Bigscreen shell and environment, we run:

kde-builder plasma-bigscreen plasma-remotecontrollers

This should pull the remote repository and put it in ~/kde/src/plasma-bigscreen. If you make any changes and want to rebuild, you should use the --no-src flag in order to have those changes built.

Running the shell in a window

We can now run the shell in a window (based on the plasma-bigscreen-common-env script):

# Ensure we are in the correct prefix
source ~/kde/build/plasma-bigscreen/prefix.sh

export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=KDE
export QT_QUICK_CONTROLS_STYLE=org.kde.breeze
export QT_ENABLE_GLYPH_CACHE_WORKAROUND=1
export QT_QUICK_CONTROLS_MOBILE=true

export PLASMA_INTEGRATION_USE_PORTAL=1
export PLASMA_PLATFORM=mediacenter
export QT_FILE_SELECTORS=mediacenter
export PLASMA_DEFAULT_SHELL=org.kde.plasma.bigscreen

# Set ~/.config/plasma-bigscreen/... as location for default bigscreen configs (i.e. envmanager generated)
export XDG_CONFIG_DIRS="$HOME/.config/plasma-bigscreen:/etc/xdg:$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS"

# Apply environment settings
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen plasma-bigscreen-envmanager --apply-settings

dbus-run-session kwin_wayland --xwayland "plasmashell -p org.kde.plasma.bigscreen" --width 1280 --height 960

The Plasma Bigscreen session should open in a window.

If you are having issues with this process, please join the developer channels linked on the home page!

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konqi is ready to develop!