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Everything you need to build Brave.

• Desktop product roadmap
• Release information

Build Instructions

Install prerequisites

Follow the instructions for your platform:

• macOS
• Windows
• Linux/Android

Clone and initialize the repo

Once you have the prerequisites installed, you can get the code and initialize the build environment.

git clone git@github.com:brave/brave-browser.git
cd brave-browser
npm install

# this takes 30-45 minutes to run
# the Chromium source is downloaded which has a large history
npm run init

brave-core based android builds should use npm run init -- --target_os=android --target_arch=arm (or whatever cpu type you want to build for)

You can also set the target_os and target_arch for init and build using

npm config set target_os android
npm config set target_arch arm

Build Brave

The default build is component.

# start the component build compile
npm run build

To do a release build:

# start the release compile
npm run build Release

brave-core based android builds should use npm run build -- --target_os=android --target_arch=arm or set the npm config variables as specified above for init

Speed up the builds

Running a release build with npm run build Release can be very slow and use a lot of RAM especially on Linux with the Gold LLVM plugin.

To run a statically linked build (takes longer to build, but starts faster)

npm run build -- Static

To run a debug build (Component build with is_debug=true)

npm run build -- Debug

You may also want to try using sccache.

Run Brave

To start the build:

npm start [Release|Component|Static|Debug]

Staying up to date

• Run npm run sync to update the brave-core ref specified in package.json. It's important to note that this will overwrite your local changes, so please back up work before running this.
• Run npm run sync -- --all to update both brave-core and chromium. It's important to note that this will overwrite your local changes, so please back up work before running this.

See below for more advanced options for branch-switching and dependency updating.

Sync commands

npm run sync will (depending on the below flags):

1. 📥 Update sub-projects (chromium, brave-core) to latest commit of a git ref (e.g. tag or branch)
2. 🤕 Apply patches (only those that require re-applying)
3. 🔄 Update gclient DEPS dependencies, only if a project was updated or explicitly asked to.
4. ⏩ Run hooks (e.g. to perform npm install on child projects), only if a project was updated or explicitly asked to. has a number of switches which can fit different styles of source code management:

These flags can be combined to fit different workflows

flag	Description
[no flags]	updates brave-core to the latest remote commit on the branch specified in brave-browser/package.json (e.g. master or 74.0.0.103). Will re-apply only patches that changed. Will update child dependencies only if any project needed updating during this script run **Use this if you want the script to manage keeping you up to date instead of pulling or switching branch manually. **
--all	updates both Chromium and brave-core to the latest remote commit on the branch specified in brave-browser/package.json (e.g. master or 74.0.0.103). Will re-apply only patches that changed. Will update child dependencies only if any project needed updating during this script run **Use this if you want the script to manage keeping you up to date instead of pulling or switching branch manually. **

Scenarios

Automatically get latest on brave-browser master, brave-core master and chromium

brave-browser> git checkout master
brave-browser> git pull
brave-browser> npm run sync -- --all
...Updating 2 patches...
...Updating child dependencies...
...Running hooks...

When you know that DEPS didn't change, but .patch files did (quickest)

brave-core> git checkout featureB
brave-core> git pull
brave-browser> npm run apply_patches
...Applying 2 patches...
brave-browser>

Troubleshooting

See Troubleshooting for solutions to common problems.