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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 debug.

# start the debug 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 speed things up we recommend doing a build with debug symbols and without being an official build. Instead you'd run

npm run build -- Release --debug_build=true --official_build=false

You may also want to try using sccache.

Run Brave

To start debug build:

npm start

To start release build:

npm start Release

Staying up to date

• Run npm run sync -- --all to grab the latest source. 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 --run_hooks --run_sync if you've updated brave-core checkout manually before the command.

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]	Will re-apply any patches that are out of date, e.g. after you manually switch branch in brave-core or manually change the target chromium file, and do nothing else.
--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. **
--brave_core_ref=[commitish]	Updates brave-core to the specified commit, does not update chromium. Otherwise same as --all.
--chrome_ref=[committish]	Updates chromium to the specified reference, does not update brave-core. Otherwise same as --all.
--run_sync	Update gclient DEPS dependencies
--init	Performs a hard reset on chromium and brave-core. Will always result in a large re-build due to all patches getting re-applied. Should only be used at the beginning of a project, or if needing to reset all changes. Instead use the safe npm run sync -- --all --run_sync --run_hooks to make sure all projects and dependencies are up to date.

Scenarios

Manually change branch but keep up to date

brave-core> git checkout branchA
brave-browser> npm run sync -- --run_sync --run_hooks
...Updating 2 patches...
...Updating child dependencies...
...Running hooks...
brave-browser> npm run build

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

# go back to master so that the branch ref doesn't get moved by the script
brave-core> git checkout master
brave-browser> git checkout master
brave-browser> git pull
brave-browser> npm run sync -- --all
...Updating 2 patches...
...Updating child dependencies...
...Running hooks...

Manually get latest on master but keep deps up to date

brave-core> git checkout master
brave-core> git pull
brave-browser> npm run sync -- --run_hooks --run_sync
...Applying 1 patch...
...Updating DEPS 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 sync
...Applying 2 patches...
brave-browser>

Troubleshooting

See Troubleshooting for solutions to common problems.