Checking out and building Chromium on Linux
There are instructions for other platforms linked from the get the code page.
Instructions for Google Employees
Are you a Google employee? See go/building-chrome instead.
Contents
System requirements
- A 64-bit Intel machine with at least 8GB of RAM. More than 16GB is highly recommended.
- At least 100GB of free disk space.
- You must have Git and Python v2 installed already.
Most development is done on Ubuntu (currently 16.04, Xenial Xerus). There are some instructions for other distros below, but they are mostly unsupported.
Install depot_tools
Clone the depot_tools repository:
$ git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git
Add depot_tools to the end of your PATH (you will probably want to put this in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc). Assuming you cloned depot_tools to /path/to/depot_tools:
$ export PATH="$PATH:/path/to/depot_tools"
When cloning depot_tools to your home directory do not use ~ on PATH, otherwise gclient runhooks will fail to run. Rather, you should use either $HOME or the absolute path:
$ export PATH="$PATH:${HOME}/depot_tools"
Get the code
Create a chromium directory for the checkout and change to it (you can call this whatever you like and put it wherever you like, as long as the full path has no spaces):
$ mkdir ~/chromium && cd ~/chromium
Run the fetch tool from depot_tools to check out the code and its dependencies.
$ fetch --nohooks chromium
If you don't want the full repo history, you can save a lot of time by adding the --no-history flag to fetch.
Expect the command to take 30 minutes on even a fast connection, and many hours on slower ones.
If you've already installed the build dependencies on the machine (from another checkout, for example), you can omit the --nohooks flag and fetch will automatically execute gclient runhooks at the end.
When fetch completes, it will have created a hidden .gclient file and a directory called src in the working directory. The remaining instructions assume you have switched to the src directory:
$ cd src
Install additional build dependencies
Once you have checked out the code, and assuming you're using Ubuntu, run build/install-build-deps.sh
$ ./build/install-build-deps.sh
You may need to adjust the build dependencies for other distros. There are some notes at the end of this document, but we make no guarantees for their accuracy.
Run the hooks
Once you've run install-build-deps at least once, you can now run the Chromium-specific hooks, which will download additional binaries and other things you might need:
$ gclient runhooks
Optional: You can also install API keys if you want your build to talk to some Google services, but this is not necessary for most development and testing purposes.
Setting up the build
Chromium uses Ninja as its main build tool along with a tool called GN to generate .ninja files. You can create any number of build directories with different configurations. To create a build directory, run:
$ gn gen out/Default
- You only have to run this once for each new build directory, Ninja will update the build files as needed.
- You can replace
Defaultwith another name, but it should be a subdirectory ofout. - For other build arguments, including release settings, see GN build configuration. The default will be a debug component build matching the current host operating system and CPU.
- For more info on GN, run
gn helpon the command line or read the quick start guide.
Faster builds
This section contains some things you can change to speed up your builds, sorted so that the things that make the biggest difference are first.
Use Goma
Google developed the distributed compiler called Goma. Googlers and contributors who have tryjob access could use Goma.
If you are not a Googler and would like to use Goma sign up.
Once you've allowed to use Goma service and installed the client, set the following GN args:
use_goma=true goma_dir="/path/to/goma-client"
Disable NaCl
By default, the build includes support for Native Client (NaCl), but most of the time you won‘t need it. You can set the GN argument enable_nacl=false and it won’t be built.
Include fewer debug symbols
By default GN produces a build with all of the debug assertions enabled (is_debug=true) and including full debug info (symbol_level=2). Setting symbol_level=1 will produce enough information for stack traces, but not line-by-line debugging. Setting symbol_level=0 will include no debug symbols at all. Either will speed up the build compared to full symbols.
Disable debug symbols for Blink
Due to its extensive use of templates, the Blink code produces about half of our debug symbols. If you don't ever need to debug Blink, you can set the GN arg blink_symbol_level=0.
Use Icecc
Icecc is the distributed compiler with a central scheduler to share build load. Currently, many external contributors use it. e.g. Intel, Opera, Samsung (this is not useful if you're using Goma).
In order to use icecc, set the following GN args:
linux_use_bundled_binutils=false use_debug_fission=false is_clang=false
See these links for more on the bundled_binutils limitation, the debug fission limitation.
Using the system linker may also be necessary when using glibc 2.21 or newer. See related bug.
ccache
You can use ccache to speed up local builds (again, this is not useful if you're using Goma).
Increase your ccache hit rate by setting CCACHE_BASEDIR to a parent directory that the working directories all have in common (e.g., /home/yourusername/development). Consider using CCACHE_SLOPPINESS=include_file_mtime (since if you are using multiple working directories, header times in svn sync'ed portions of your trees will be different - see the ccache troubleshooting section for additional information). If you use symbolic links from your home directory to get to the local physical disk directory where you keep those working development directories, consider putting
alias cd="cd -P"
in your .bashrc so that $PWD or cwd always refers to a physical, not logical directory (and make sure CCACHE_BASEDIR also refers to a physical parent).
If you tune ccache correctly, a second working directory that uses a branch tracking trunk and is up to date with trunk and was gclient sync'ed at about the same time should build chrome in about 1/3 the time, and the cache misses as reported by ccache -s should barely increase.
This is especially useful if you use git-new-workdir and keep multiple local working directories going at once.
Using tmpfs
You can use tmpfs for the build output to reduce the amount of disk writes required. I.e. mount tmpfs to the output directory where the build output goes:
As root:
mount -t tmpfs -o size=20G,nr_inodes=40k,mode=1777 tmpfs /path/to/out
Quick and dirty benchmark numbers on a HP Z600 (Intel core i7, 16 cores hyperthreaded, 12 GB RAM)
- With tmpfs:
- 12m:20s
- Without tmpfs
- 15m:40s
Build Chromium
Build Chromium (the “chrome” target) with Ninja using the command:
$ autoninja -C out/Default chrome
(autoninja is a wrapper that automatically provides optimal values for the arguments passed to ninja.)
You can get a list of all of the other build targets from GN by running gn ls out/Default from the command line. To compile one, pass the GN label to Ninja with no preceding “//” (so, for //chrome/test:unit_tests use autoninja -C out/Default chrome/test:unit_tests).
Run Chromium
Once it is built, you can simply run the browser:
$ out/Default/chrome
Running test targets
You can run the tests in the same way. You can also limit which tests are run using the --gtest_filter arg, e.g.:
$ out/Default/unit_tests --gtest_filter="PushClientTest.*"
You can find out more about GoogleTest at its GitHub page.
Update your checkout
To update an existing checkout, you can run
$ git rebase-update
$ gclient sync
The first command updates the primary Chromium source repository and rebases any of your local branches on top of tip-of-tree (aka the Git branch origin/master). If you don't want to use this script, you can also just use git pull or other common Git commands to update the repo.
The second command syncs dependencies to the appropriate versions and re-runs hooks as needed.
Tips, tricks, and troubleshooting
Linker Crashes
If, during the final link stage:
LINK out/Debug/chrome
You get an error like:
collect2: ld terminated with signal 6 Aborted terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc' collect2: ld terminated with signal 11 [Segmentation fault], core dumped
you are probably running out of memory when linking. You must use a 64-bit system to build. Try the following build settings (see GN build configuration for other settings):
- Build in release mode (debugging symbols require more memory):
is_debug = false - Turn off symbols:
symbol_level = 0 - Build in component mode (this is for development only, it will be slower and may have broken functionality):
is_component_build = true
More links
- Information about building with Clang.
- You may want to use a chroot to isolate yourself from versioning or packaging conflicts.
- Cross-compiling for ARM? See LinuxChromiumArm.
- Want to use Eclipse as your IDE? See LinuxEclipseDev.
- Want to use your built version as your default browser? See LinuxDevBuildAsDefaultBrowser.
Next Steps
If you want to contribute to the effort toward a Chromium-based browser for Linux, please check out the Linux Development page for more information.
Notes for other distros
Arch Linux
Instead of running install-build-deps.sh to install build dependencies, run:
$ sudo pacman -S --needed python perl gcc gcc-libs bison flex gperf pkgconfig
nss alsa-lib glib2 gtk3 nspr ttf-ms-fonts freetype2 cairo dbus libgnome-keyring
For the optional packages on Arch Linux:
php-cgiis provided withpacmanwdiffis not in the main repository butdwdiffis. You can getwdiffin AUR/yaourtsun-java6-fontsdo not seem to be in main repository or AUR.
Crostini (Debian based)
First install the file and lsb-release commands for the script to run properly:
$ sudo apt-get install file lsb-release
Then invoke install-build-deps.sh with the --no-arm argument, because the ARM toolchain doesn't exist for this configuration:
$ sudo install-build-deps.sh --no-arm
Fedora
Instead of running build/install-build-deps.sh, run:
su -c 'yum install git python bzip2 tar pkgconfig atk-devel alsa-lib-devel
bison binutils brlapi-devel bluez-libs-devel bzip2-devel cairo-devel
cups-devel dbus-devel dbus-glib-devel expat-devel fontconfig-devel
freetype-devel gcc-c++ glib2-devel glibc.i686 gperf glib2-devel
gtk3-devel java-1.*.0-openjdk-devel libatomic libcap-devel libffi-devel
libgcc.i686 libgnome-keyring-devel libjpeg-devel libstdc++.i686 libX11-devel
libXScrnSaver-devel libXtst-devel libxkbcommon-x11-devel ncurses-compat-libs
nspr-devel nss-devel pam-devel pango-devel pciutils-devel
pulseaudio-libs-devel zlib.i686 httpd mod_ssl php php-cli python-psutil wdiff
xorg-x11-server-Xvfb'
The fonts needed by Blink's web tests can be obtained by following these instructions. For the optional packages:
php-cgiis provided by thephp-clipackage.sun-java6-fontsis covered by the instructions linked above.
Gentoo
You can just run emerge www-client/chromium.
OpenSUSE
Use zypper command to install dependencies:
(openSUSE 11.1 and higher)
sudo zypper in subversion pkg-config python perl bison flex gperf
mozilla-nss-devel glib2-devel gtk-devel wdiff lighttpd gcc gcc-c++
mozilla-nspr mozilla-nspr-devel php5-fastcgi alsa-devel libexpat-devel
libjpeg-devel libbz2-devel
For 11.0, use libnspr4-0d and libnspr4-dev instead of mozilla-nspr and mozilla-nspr-devel, and use php5-cgi instead of php5-fastcgi.
(openSUSE 11.0)
sudo zypper in subversion pkg-config python perl
bison flex gperf mozilla-nss-devel glib2-devel gtk-devel
libnspr4-0d libnspr4-dev wdiff lighttpd gcc gcc-c++ libexpat-devel
php5-cgi alsa-devel gtk3-devel jpeg-devel
The Ubuntu package sun-java6-fonts contains a subset of Java of the fonts used. Since this package requires Java as a prerequisite anyway, we can do the same thing by just installing the equivalent openSUSE Sun Java package:
sudo zypper in java-1_6_0-sun
WebKit is currently hard-linked to the Microsoft fonts. To install these using zypper
sudo zypper in fetchmsttfonts pullin-msttf-fonts
To make the fonts installed above work, as the paths are hardcoded for Ubuntu, create symlinks to the appropriate locations:
sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arial.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Arial.ttf
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arialbd.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Arial_Bold.ttf
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arialbi.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Arial_Bold_Italic.ttf
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ariali.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Arial_Italic.ttf
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/comic.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Comic_Sans_MS.ttf
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/comicbd.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Comic_Sans_MS_Bold.ttf
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/cour.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Courier_New.ttf
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fonts/truetype/courbd.ttf /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Courier_New_Bold.ttf
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fonts/