• Make sure that you have Java installed (if you want to build a minified version of jQuery). If not, go to this page and download "Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 5.0"
  http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp

• You now have two options for building jQuery, if you have access to common UNIX commands (like make, mkdir, rm, cat, and echo) then simply type make to build all the components.

• The other option is if you have Ant installed (or are on Windows and don't have access to make). You can download Ant from here: http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi If you do have Ant, everytime (in this README) that I say 'make', do 'ant' instead - it works identically (for all intents and purposes).

In the main directory of the distribution (the one that this file is in), type the following to make all versions of jQuery:

make

Here are each of the individual items that are buildable from the Makefile.

make init

Pull in all the external dependencies (QUnit, Sizzle) for the project.

make jquery

The standard, uncompressed, jQuery code.
Makes: ./dist/jquery.js

make min

A compressed version of jQuery (made the YUI Minifier).
Makes: ./dist/jquery.min.js

make selector

Builds the selector library for jQuery from Sizzle.
Makes: ./src/selector.js

Finally, you can remove all the built files using the command:

make clean

Additionally, if you want to install jQuery to a location that is not this directory, you can specify the PREFIX directory, for example:

make PREFIX=/home/john/test/

OR

make PREFIX=~/www/ docs

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them on the jQuery mailing list, which can be found here:
http://docs.jquery.com/Discussion