Home

Everything you need to build Brave.

Build Instructions

Install prerequisites

Follow the instructions for your platform:

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):

📥 Update sub-projects (chromium, brave-core) to latest commit of a git ref (e.g. tag or branch)
🤕 Apply patches (only those that require re-applying)
🔄 Update gclient DEPS dependencies, only if a project was updated or explicitly asked to.
⏩ 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.

brave / brave-browser