Building ThingsBoard from Sources

This guide walks you through downloading and building ThingsBoard from source code. Instructions are tested on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and CentOS 8/9.

ThingsBoard is built using Java 17. See Install Java 17 on Ubuntu for installation instructions.

Verify the installation:

java -version

ThingsBoard requires Maven 3.1.0 or newer.

sudo apt-get install maven

sudo yum install maven

Clone the ThingsBoard repository from GitHub:

# checkout latest release branch
git clone -b release-4.3 https://github.com/thingsboard/thingsboard.git --depth 1
cd thingsboard

From the project root directory, run:

mvn clean install -DskipTests

This command builds the project, skips unit and integration tests, and produces installation artifacts.

To build local Docker images for ThingsBoard services, ensure Docker is installed. Then run:

mvn clean install -DskipTests -Ddockerfile.skip=false

List the built images:

docker images

After a successful build, installation packages are available in:

application/target

This directory contains:

• .deb packages for Debian/Ubuntu
• .rpm packages for CentOS/RHEL
• Windows installation packages

This requires Docker and Docker Compose. Make sure Docker is configured to run as a non-root user.

mvn clean install

Black-box tests are located in the msa/black-box-tests directory. Follow the instructions in the README to execute them.

Clean Maven cache:

rm -rf ~/.m2/repository

Clean Gradle cache:

rm -rf ~/.gradle/caches/

Clean node modules:

rm -rf ui-ngx/node_modules

Build in parallel, format headers, build Docker images:

mvn -T 0.8C license:format clean install -DskipTests -Ddockerfile.skip=false

If you see the following error when running a locally built Docker image:

Standard_init_linux.go:175 exec user process caused no such file

This usually indicates incorrect line endings.

Solution: reconfigure Git to use LF line endings, re-clone the repository, and rebuild the Docker images. See the Source code section above for details.