There are instructions for other platforms linked from the get the code page.
- Download Chromium Macbook Pro Keyboard Cover
- Download Chromium Macbook Pro Download
- Macbook Pro 13 Inch
We will use the built-in Safari browser on your Mac to download and install Google Chrome. Open Safari from your Dock. In the address bar at the top, type then press return. Get more done with the new Google Chrome. A more simple, secure, and faster web browser than ever, with Google’s smarts built-in.
Instructions for Google Employees
Are you a Google employee? See go/building-chrome instead.
System requirements
A 64-bit Mac running 10.14+.
Xcode 11.2+
The OS X 10.15.1 SDK. Run
to check whether you have it. Building with a newer SDK works too, but the releases currently use Xcode 11.2.1.
Install depot_tools
Clone the depot_tools
repository:
Add depot_tools
to the end of your PATH (you will probably want to put this in your ~/.bash_profile
or ~/.zshrc
). Assuming you cloned depot_tools
to /path/to/depot_tools
(note: you must use the absolute path or Python will not be able to find infra tools):
Get the code
Ensure that unicode filenames aren't mangled by HFS:
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):
Run the fetch
tool from depot_tools
to check out the code and its dependencies.
If you don't need the full repo history, you can save time by using fetch --no-history chromium
. You can call git fetch --unshallow
to retrieve the full history later.
Expect the command to take 30 minutes on even a fast connection, and many hours on slower ones.
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:
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:
- You only have to run this once for each new build directory, Ninja will update the build files as needed.
- You can replace
Default
with 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 help
on the command line or read the quick start guide. - Building Chromium for arm Macs requires additional setup.
Faster builds
Full rebuilds are about the same speed in Debug and Release, but linking is a lot faster in Release builds.
Put
in your args.gn
to do a release build.
Put
in your args.gn
to build many small dylibs instead of a single large executable. This makes incremental builds much faster, at the cost of producing a binary that opens less quickly. Component builds work in both debug and release.
Put
in your args.gn to disable debug symbols altogether. This makes both full rebuilds and linking faster (at the cost of not getting symbolized backtraces in gdb).
CCache
You might also want to install ccache to speed up the build.
Build Chromium
Build Chromium (the “chrome” target) with Ninja using the command:
(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:
Download Chromium Macbook Pro Keyboard Cover
Avoiding the “incoming network connections” dialog
Every time you start a new developer build of Chrome you get a system dialog asking “Do you want the application Chromium.app to accept incoming network connections?” - to avoid this, run with this command-line flag:
--disable-features=“MediaRouter”
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.:
You can find out more about GoogleTest at its GitHub page.
Debugging
Good debugging tips can be found here. If you would like to debug in a graphical environment, rather than using lldb
at the command line, that is possible without building in Xcode (see Debugging in Xcode).
Tips for printing variables from lldb
prompt (both in Xcode or in terminal):
- If
uptr
is astd::unique_ptr
, the address it wraps is accessible asuptr.__ptr_.__value_
. - To pretty-print
base::string16
, ensure you have a~/.lldbinit
file and add the following line into it (substitute {SRC} for your actual path to the root of Chromium's sources):
Update your checkout
To update an existing checkout, you can run
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
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Using Xcode-Ninja Hybrid
Macbook Pro 13 Inch
While using Xcode is unsupported, GN supports a hybrid approach of using Ninja for building, but Xcode for editing and driving compilation. Xcode is still slow, but it runs fairly well even with indexing enabled. Most people build in the Terminal and write code with a text editor, though.
With hybrid builds, compilation is still handled by Ninja, and can be run from the command line (e.g. autoninja -C out/gn chrome
) or by choosing the chrome
target in the hybrid project and choosing Build.
To use Xcode-Ninja Hybrid pass --ide=xcode
to gn gen
:
Open it:
You may run into a problem where http://YES is opened as a new tab every time you launch Chrome. To fix this, open the scheme editor for the Run scheme, choose the Options tab, and uncheck “Allow debugging when using document Versions Browser”. When this option is checked, Xcode adds --NSDocumentRevisionsDebugMode YES
to the launch arguments, and the YES
gets interpreted as a URL to open.
If you have problems building, join us in #chromium
on irc.freenode.net
and ask there. Be sure that the waterfall is green and the tree is open before checking out. This will increase your chances of success.
Improving performance of git status
Increase the vnode cache size
git status
is used frequently to determine the status of your checkout. Due to the large number of files in Chromium‘s checkout, git status
performance can be quite variable. Increasing the system’s vnode cache appears to help. By default, this command:
Outputs kern.maxvnodes: 263168
(263168 is 257 * 1024). To increase this setting:
Higher values may be appropriate if you routinely move between different Chromium checkouts. This setting will reset on reboot, the startup setting can be set in /etc/sysctl.conf
:
Or edit the file directly.
Configure git to use an untracked cache
If git --version
reports 2.8 or higher, try running
If the output ends with OK
, then the following may also improve performance of git status
:
If git --version
reports 2.6 or higher, but below 2.8, you can instead run
Xcode license agreement
If you're getting the error
Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license requires admin privileges, please re-run as root via sudo.
the Xcode license hasn't been accepted yet which (contrary to the message) any user can do by running:
Only accepting for all users of the machine requires root: