Windows Development Environment
You should follow the steps from Chromium's Checking out and Building Chromium for Windows guide stopping before the Get the code step
Before you begin, make sure your system satisfies the system requirements.
Exclusions should be added for working directories in any active antivirus software (Defender Antivirus is enabled by default).
Install Visual Studio Community 2022. Follow guidance from the "Visual Studio" section of the Chromium Windows build instructions.
Install Windows 11 SDK 10.0.22621.0. (VS 2022 installer does not include this version).
If you need to clone brave-core or another repo on Windows, you can install Git from https://git-scm.com/downloads. Alternatively, you can use the version included in depot_tools.
After you have Git on your machine, please configure it according to the "Get the Code" section of the Chromium Windows build instructions, specifically all of the git config --global commands.
Git is included in depot_tools. At the moment, there are known issues calling out to Git if your system has the version from depot_tools PATH'ed.
Install the Node.js active LTS (v20+) from https://nodejs.org/.
If you don't already have a system version of Python, you can get version 3 from https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/.
When doing the build, the version from depot_tools is used. Some legacy scripts are using Python 2.7.
Python is included in depot_tools. At the moment, there are known issues calling out to Python if your system has the version from depot_tools PATH'ed.
Now you are ready to follow the next step of the build instructions in the wiki.
It's always best to run Brave from a standard cmd.exe shell or via Windows Explorer. There are instances where debug builds of Brave attempt to log to stderr, which will fail and potentially result in unexpected crashes in non-standard shells (e.g., Cygwin, Git for Windows, etc.)
The upstream documentation for Checking out and Building Chromium on Windows have a lot of useful information on configuring Windows, resolving common problems, speeding up builds, etc.
We recommend cloning the brave-browser Git repository to the top level of your C:\ drive because:
- Some developers have encountered problems with paths exceeding 256 chars when the repository is cloned to a subdirectory.
- Some developers have encountered problems with paths that contain spaces (e.g. the path to your home directory, if your username contains spaces) and some of Chromium's build tools.