Installing Defold

Installation of the Defold editor is quite straightforward. Download the version built for your operating system, extract it and copy the software to a suitable location.

Downloading

Go to the Defold download page where you will find Download buttons for macOS, Windows and Linux (Ubuntu):

download editor

Installation

Installation on macOS
The downloaded file is a DMG image containing the program.
  1. Locate the file “Defold-x86_64-macos.dmg” and double click it to open the image.
  2. Drag the application “Defold” to the “Applications” folder link.

To start the editor, open your “Applications” folder and double click the file “Defold”.

Defold macOS

Installation on Windows
The downloaded file is a ZIP archive that needs to be extracted:
  1. Locate the archive file “Defold-x86_64-win32.zip”, press and hold (or right-click) the folder, select Extract All, and then follow the instructions to extract the archive to a folder named “Defold”.
  2. Move the folder “Defold” to your preferred location (e.g. D:\Defold). You should not move Defold to C:\Program Files (x86)\ or C:\Program Files\ since this will prevent the editor from updating.

To start the editor, open the folder “Defold” and double click the file “Defold.exe”.

Defold windows

Installation on Linux
The downloaded file is a ZIP archive that needs to be extracted:
  1. From a terminal, locate the archive file “Defold-x86_64-linux.zip” unzip it to a target Directory called “Defold”.

    $ unzip Defold-x86_64-linux.zip -d Defold
    

To start the editor, change directory to where you extracted the application, then run the Defold executable, or double click it on your desktop.

$ cd Defold
$ ./Defold

There is a helper to install a desktop entry on the Help > Create Desktop Entry menu.

If you run into any problems starting the editor, opening a project or running a Defold game please refer to the Linux section of the FAQ.

Install an old version

From Defold GitHub release page

Every stable version of Defold is also released on GitHub.

From Defold download page

You can download and install old editor versions using the following link pattern:

  • Windows: https://d.defold.com/archive/%sha1%/stable/editor2/Defold-x86_64-win32.zip
  • macOS: https://d.defold.com/archive/%sha1%/stable/editor2/Defold-x86_64-macos.dmg
  • Linux: https://d.defold.com/archive/%sha1%/stable/editor2/Defold-x86_64-linux.zip

Replace %sha1% by the editor release hash representing the version in question. The hash of each Defold version can be seen in the links to the released version on the download page at https://d.defold.com/stable/ (make sure to remove the initial # character and only copy the alpha-numeric part):

download editor