CKEditor 4
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guideGetting the Source Code

Working with the source code of CKEditor may be useful. These are some possible situations that you may face:

  • You are developing plugins or skins, so you want to build your own distributions.
  • You are assembling the editor by yourself, by adding plugins and skins to it manually.
  • You want to understand the CKEditor API better by reading the code.
  • You want to fix an issue. (Yes, do it!)
  • You want to propose some new features or enhancements. (Likewise, we are looking forward to them!)

# Cloning from GitHub

The CKEditor source code is available in the ckeditor-dev Git repository hosted at GitHub.

If you have Git installed in your system, use the following command line call to create your local copy:

git clone https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor-dev.git

This will download the full CKEditor development code into the ckeditor-dev folder.

# Performance

Note that the source code version of CKEditor is not optimized for production websites. It works flawlessly on a local computer or network, but if you include it in your production website, it may need to do more than two hundred HTTP requests to download more than a megabyte of code.

Because of this do not use the source code version of CKEditor in production websites!

Once your local development is completed, create a CKEditor build that will be distribution-ready.