Electron Build Instructions

Build Instructions (experimental GN build)

Follow the guidelines below for building Electron with the experimental GN
build.

NOTE: The GN build system is in experimental status.

Prerequisites

Check the build prerequisites for your platform before proceeding

• macOS
• Linux
• Windows

Install depot_tools

You’ll need to install depot_tools, the toolset
used for fetching Chromium and its dependencies.

Also, on Windows, you’ll need to set the environment variable
DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0. To do so, open Control Panel → System and Security → System → Advanced system settings and add a system variable
DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN with value 0. This tells depot_tools to use
your locally installed version of Visual Studio (by default, depot_tools will
try to download a Google-internal version that only Googlers have access to).

Getting the Code

Using a Git cache (optional step)

gclient fetches about 16G worth of repository data. If you plan on building
more than once, consider using its cache feature to make future calls faster:

$ export GIT_CACHE_PATH="$HOME/.git_cache"
$ mkdir -p "$GIT_CACHE_PATH"
# This will take about 16G.

Getting the code with gclient

$ mkdir electron-gn && cd electron-gn
$ gclient config \
    --name "src/electron" \
    --unmanaged \
    https://github.com/electron/electron
$ gclient sync --with_branch_heads --with_tags
# This will take a while, go get a coffee.

Building

$ cd src
$ export CHROMIUM_BUILDTOOLS_PATH=`pwd`/buildtools
$ gn gen out/Default --args='import("//electron/build/args/debug.gn")'

This will generate a build directory out/Default under src/ with
debug build configuration. You can replace Default with another name,
but it should be a subdirectory of out.
Also you shouldn’t have to run gn gen again—if you want to change the
build arguments, you can run gn args out/Default to bring up an editor.

To see the list of available build configuration options, run gn args out/Default --list.

For generating Debug (aka “component” or “shared”) build config of
Electron:

$ gn gen out/Default --args='import("//electron/build/args/debug.gn")'

For generating Release (aka “non-component” or “static”) build config of
Electron:

$ gn gen out/Default --args='import("//electron/build/args/release.gn")'

To build, run ninja with the electron:electron_app target:

$ ninja -C out/Default electron:electron_app
# This will also take a while and probably heat up your lap.

This will build all of what was previously ‘libchromiumcontent’ (i.e. the
content/ directory of chromium and its dependencies, incl. WebKit and V8),
so it will take a while.

To speed up subsequent builds, you can use sccache. Add the GN arg
cc_wrapper = "sccache" by running gn args out/Default to bring up an
editor and adding a line to the end of the file.

The built executable will be under ./out/Default:

$ ./out/Default/Electron.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron
# or, on Windows
$ ./out/Default/electron.exe
# or, on Linux
$ ./out/Default/electron

Cross-compiling

To compile for a platform that isn’t the same as the one you’re building on,
set the target_cpu and target_os GN arguments. For example, to compile an
x86 target from an x64 host, specify target_cpu = "x86" in gn args.

$ gn gen out/Default-x86 --args='... target_cpu = "x86"'

Not all combinations of source and target CPU/OS are supported by Chromium.
Only cross-compiling Windows 32-bit from Windows 64-bit and Linux 32-bit from
Linux 64-bit have been tested in Electron. If you test other combinations and
find them to work, please update this document 😃

See the GN reference for allowable values of target_os
and target_cpu

Tests

To run the tests, you’ll first need to build the test modules against the
same version of Node.js that was built as part of the build process. To
generate build headers for the modules to compile against, run the following
under src/ directory.

$ ninja -C out/Default third_party/electron_node:headers
# Install the test modules with the generated headers
$ (cd electron/spec && npm i --nodedir=../../out/Default/gen/node_headers)

Then, run Electron with electron/spec as the argument:

# on Mac:
$ ./out/Default/Electron.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron electron/spec
# on Windows:
$ ./out/Default/electron.exe electron/spec
# on Linux:
$ ./out/Default/electron electron/spec

If you’re debugging something, it can be helpful to pass some extra flags to
the Electron binary:

$ ./out/Default/Electron.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron electron/spec \
  --ci --enable-logging -g 'BrowserWindow module'