Hey everyone!

I just wanted to share how you can compile your FlashDevelop projects under Linux.

No virtual machine is required. I am using Ubuntu 10.10 x64, but it should work fine on other distributions, maybe with slight modifications.

Copy this script, open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and paste (Ctrl+Shift+V)



This will download Mono, FDBuild, the FlexSDK and extract the standalone player for viewing SWF files.

To use it, you can either call FDBuild directly by running "mono /opt/fdbuild/fdbuild.exe" from a terminal, or you can use the shell script I have provided.

The shell script gives FDBuild the path to the Flex SDK, and can also be edited to support any global classpaths you may have. There is already a blank "-cp" argument to help you get started. The script currently accepts two arguments: the path to the project file you wish to compile, and the path to the output SWF so it can launch it after compiling



The script currently runs using sudo, since Java (on my system) complains about not being able to find jar files when it is run as a normal user. I'm not entirely sure why. This could also probably be a bit more elegant ... but I hope it is still helpful!

Feel free to share any suggestions you may have to improve the process. This currently does not run FCSH for faster compile times, and will still run the SWF if there are compiler errors. However, this should make it a lot easier to compile projects on Linux, even if you don't use FlashDevelop to edit the code.

UPDATE:

Until we have a plugin or other application in Linux to create FlashDevelop projects for us, I have temporarily added a "template.as3proj" file to the FDBuild package which should help.



You can copy out the template, then edit with gedit, vim, or whatever you prefer. You'll need to put in the relative path for where you want the SWF to be created (IE: "Export\MyProject.swf") and the relative path for where your document class is located (IE: "Source\com\my\project\MyProject.as")

UPDATE (2):

I've just integrated Philippe's great "bonus" to the fdbuild.sh script, so now you can compile projects like so:



... and it will automatically pull the output SWF path from the project file in order to launch Flash Player.

If you already have the scripts installed, you can update to the latest version like this:

MacOS instructions:

First download and install 'mono' for MacOSX if you don't have it (type 'mono' in the terminal to check if it's installed already).

Download Flex SDK, FDBuild and scripts:

Please note that the standalone Flash Player must be installed interactively - the DMG is in the SDK:

Build script (fdbuild.sh) must be modified to run the player app:

Bonus: In this new script the output SWF is extracted from the project file so you can now just do:

Nice, this would save me time from creating Linux build scripts for projects made with FlashDevelop.

About the "sudo" issue, you forget to grant access for normal users to FlexSDK. To fix, add the following command after unzipping FlexSDK:

Then remove "sudo" in fdbuild.sh.

(It is better to be able to build the project as normal user. If you use sudo, the output file will be own by root)

Thanks ttt_conan - I updated the instructions.

I also updated the script in fdbuild.zip to not use sudo. Thanks! I knew there must have been a logical cause for the jarfile error

I just tried this with Mac OSX Lion. Terminal doesn't know what the opt folder is. Typing in
sudo unzip fdbuild.zip -d /opt/fdbuild
causes an error that it doesn't know the path. Leaving out the opt section works to a degree. With leaving out the opt, I get an error with

#!/bin/sh
mono /opt/fdbuild/fdbuild.exe -compiler /opt/FlexSDK "$1"
open -a "Flash Player Debugger" "`cat "$1" | egrep -o 'movie path="([^"]+)' | sed 's/movie path="//' | sed 's/\\\\/\\//'`"

Any thoughts?

Create the /opt folder