Getting the source

Downloading the Godot source code

Before getting into the SCons build system and compiling Godot, you need to actually download the Godot source code.

The source code is available on GitHub and while you can manually download it via the website, in general you want to do it via the git version control system.

If you are compiling in order to make contributions or pull requests, you should follow the instructions from the Pull Request workflow.

If you don’t know much about git yet, there are a great number of tutorials available on various websites.

In general, you need to install git and/or one of the various GUI clients.

Afterwards, to get the latest development version of the Godot source code (the unstable master branch), you can use git clone.

If you are using the git command line client, this is done by entering the following in a terminal:

  1. git clone https://github.com/godotengine/godot.git
  2. # You can add the --depth 1 argument to omit the commit history (shallow clone).
  3. # A shallow clone is faster, but not all Git operations (like blame) will work.

For any stable release, visit the release page and click on the link for the release you want. You can then download and extract the source from the download link on the page.

With git, you can also clone a stable release by specifying its branch or tag after the --branch (or just -b) argument:

  1. # Clone the continuously maintained stable branch (`4.3` as of writing).
  2. git clone https://github.com/godotengine/godot.git -b 4.3
  4. # Clone the `4.3-stable` tag. This is a fixed revision that will never change.
  5. git clone https://github.com/godotengine/godot.git -b 4.3-stable
  7. # After cloning, optionally go to a specific commit.
  8. # This can be used to access the source code at a specific point in time,
  9. # e.g. for development snapshots, betas and release candidates.
  10. cd godot
  11. git checkout f4af8201bac157b9d47e336203d3e8a8ef729de2

The maintenance branches are used to release further patches on each minor version.

You can get the source code for each release and pre-release in .tar.xz format from godotengine/godot-builds on GitHub. This lacks version control information but has a slightly smaller download size.

After downloading the Godot source code, you can continue to compiling Godot.

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