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The old instructions for getting the code

This page is obsolete. Please see Get the Code: Checkout, Build, & Run Chromium instead.

Prerequisites

Chromium supports building on Windows, Mac and Linux host systems. Linux is required for building Android, and a Mac is required for building iOS.

Platform-specific requirements

This page documents common checkout and build instructions. There are platform-specific pages with additional information and requirements:

Set up your environment

Check out and install the depot_tools package. This contains the custom tools necessary to check out and build.

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

Check out the source code

Use the "fetch" tool that came with depot_tools:

fetch chromium    # [fetch --no-history chromium]
cd src    # All other commands are executed from the src/ directory.

Use --no-history if you don't need repo history and want a faster checkout. Expect a checkout to take at least 30 minutes on fast connections, and many hours on slower connections.

Post-sync hooks

Some platform-specific pages (linked above) may have extra instructions. In particular, on Ubuntu Linux run:

./build/install-build-deps.sh

Optional: install API keys which allow your build to use certain Google services. This isn't necessary for most development and testing purposes.

Run hooks to fetch everything needed for your build setup.

gclient runhooks

Update the checkout

To sync to newer versions of the code (not necessary the first time), run the following in your src/ directory:

git rebase-update
gclient sync

The first command updates the primary Chromium source repository and rebases your local development branches on top of tip-of-tree. The second command updates all of the dependencies specified in the DEPS file. See also "More help managing your checkout" below.

Setting up the build

GN is our meta-build system. It reads build configuration from BUILD.gn files and writes Ninja files to your build directory. To create a GN build directory:

gn gen out/Default

Building

Build Chromium (the "chrome" target) with Ninja using the command:

ninja -C out/Default chrome

List all GN targets by running gn ls out/Default from the command line. To compile one, pass to Ninja the GN label with no preceding "//" (so for //ui/display:display_unittests use ninja -C out/Default ui/display:display_unittests).

Running

You can run chrome with (substituting "Default" with your build directory):

Running tests

Run the test targets listed above in the same manner. You can specify only a certain set of tests to run using --gtest_filter, e.g.

out/Default/unit_tests --gtest_filter="PushClientTest.*"

You can find out more about GoogleTest on the GoogleTest wiki page

Quick start to submit a patch

See contributing code for a more in-depth guide.

git checkout -b my_patch
...write, compile, test...
git commit -a
git cl upload

The git cl upload command will upload your code review to codereview.chromium.org for review.

More help managing your checkout

Getting help