Rather than building every module all the time, you may only want to build a single module, or other small subset. Rather than editing your configuration file, you can simply pass the names of modules or module sets to build to the command line. % kdesrc-build --include-dependencies dolphin Updating kde-build-metadata (to branch master) Updating sysadmin-repo-metadata (to branch master) Building extra-cmake-modules from frameworks-set (1/79) Updating extra-cmake-modules (to branch master) No changes to extra-cmake-modules source, proceeding to build. Running cmake... Compiling... succeeded (after 0 seconds) Installing.. succeeded (after 0 seconds) Building phonon from phonon (2/79) Updating phonon (to branch master) No changes to phonon source, proceeding to build. Compiling... succeeded (after 0 seconds) Installing.. succeeded (after 0 seconds) Building attica from frameworks-set (3/79) Updating attica (to branch master) No changes to attica source, proceeding to build. Compiling... succeeded (after 0 seconds) Installing.. succeeded (after 0 seconds) ... Building dolphin from base-apps (79/79) Updating dolphin (to branch master) No changes to dolphin source, proceeding to build. Compiling... succeeded (after 0 seconds) Installing.. succeeded (after 0 seconds) <<< PACKAGES SUCCESSFULLY BUILT >>> Built 79 modules Your logs are saved in /home/kde-src/kdesrc/log/2018-01-20-07 In this case, although only the dolphin application was specified, the --include-dependencies flag caused &kdesrc-build; to include the dependencies listed for dolphin (by setting the include-dependencies option). The dependency resolution worked in this case only because dolphin happened to be specified in a kde-projects-based module set (in this example, named base-apps). See .