When working with the Blender API, it is sometimes useful to get “under the hood” and at least visually, in general, see how this or that section of the main program code is made. It is very easy to do this, since the Blender source code is open for study and modification by anyone, thanks to the GPL license.
All source code is published on the official developer portal: https://projects.blender.org/
In order to download the latest (current) version of the Blender source code, we need to:
- Visit the main Blender repository at https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/, or select the “Products” – “Blender” menu items on the main page of the development portal.
- Click on the blue “Code” button and select “Download ZIP”
The Blender source codes will be downloaded to our computer in a zip archive. All that remains is to unpack them to any convenient folder.
If we need to download the source code of an earlier version of Blender, rather than the current version, we must first switch to the required version before downloading.
Blender versions in the repository are designated by “tags”. To go to the required version, click on the link with the text “230 tags” (the number before the word “tags” may be different).
Find the required version by scrolling the list by pages, or in the search bar we can type the digital designation of the required version, for example, “2.79”.
By clicking on the required version in the search results, we will go to the repository page with the source code for this version of Blender. To download them, we must also click on the “Code” button and select “Download ZIP”.
If for some reason it is not convenient to download Blender source codes from the official development site, they can be downloaded from GitHub. All Blender source codes are centrally copied there.
To download Blender source code from GitHub:
- Go to the GitHub page at https://github.com/blender/blender. The source code for the latest version of Blender is located here.
- Click the green “Code” button and select “Download ZIP”.
The Blender source code will be downloaded to the computer, and all we have to do is unzip it from the zip-archive to the desired folder.
To download earlier versions of Blender via GitHub, we can use “tags” in the same way. Click the “230 tags” link,
and go to the page with the list of Blender versions.
We can scroll the pages with versions by clicking the Previous/Next buttons.
Although there is no convenient field for searching for the required Blender version, we can limit the list and go directly to the desired version.
In order to go almost immediately to the required version, for example, 2.79, in the address bar after “tags” we need to add a question mark and the variable “after” and specify a value for it – we can either the required version, or a version one more to get all variants of the required version.
To switch to the 2.79 version, we add the following text to the address bar: “?after=v2.80”.
This way, we will filter all versions of Blender that were before 2.80 (including it). Thus, immediately after the links to version 2.80, we will see all the links to all variants of version 2.79, including the letter 2.79a and 2.79b, and we can choose to download the one we need.
Click on the required version, go to its repository page and download it by clicking the “Code” – “Download ZIP” links.