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guideGetting the Source Code

Working with the source code of CKEditor 4 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 4 source code is available in the ckeditor4 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/ckeditor4.git

This will download the full CKEditor 4 development code into the ckeditor4 folder.

# Performance

Note that the source code version of CKEditor 4 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 4 in production websites!

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