Building NW.js (v0.12 and below)

NOTE: some content in this wiki applies only to 0.12 and earlier versions. For official documentation on 0.13 and later, see http://docs.nwjs.io

Quick Start

Get the code

cd
git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git
export PATH=$PATH:~/depot_tools

Above will give you gclient the main build tool. You should also edit your ~/.bashrc file so that gclient can always be found.

mkdir node-webkit
cd node-webkit
touch .gclient
vi .gclient

Now edit the file .gclient, and paste this into it:

    solutions = [
       { "name"        : "src",
         "url"         : "https://github.com/nwjs/chromium.src.git@origin/nw12",
         "deps_file"   : "DEPS",
         "managed"     : True,
         "custom_deps" : {
           "src/third_party/WebKit/LayoutTests": None,
           "src/chrome_frame/tools/test/reference_build/chrome": None,
           "src/chrome_frame/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_win": None,
           "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome": None,
           "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_linux": None,
           "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_mac": None,
           "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_win": None,
         },
         "safesync_url": "",
       },
    ]

sync and build

gclient sync --no-history
cd src
./build/gyp_chromium content/content.gyp

Unless you are building nw13, which in this case you run

./build/gyp_chromium

Detailed Build Documentation

Our compilation will follow Chromium's standard, by using gclient and gyp, be sure to read following documentations before you continue, they contained required knowledge to build node-webkit.

Get the Code - the usage of gclient

And preview the upstream instructions for your platform, they contained important building conventions.

Prerequisite

Get the Chromium depot_tools.
Setup building enviroment, see Build Instructions above.

Starting from v0.11.0, it's required to use at least VS2013 Pro update 2 or VS Community 2013 to build on windows. And see also the section 'Official extra build settings' below.

Get the Code

node-webkit is now a part of our custom Chromium, that means the way we get node-webkit is mostly the same with Chromium, following steps are indeed modified from the Get the Code.

First find a place to put our code, it will take up about 14G disk space after compilation.

Getting main version of node-webkit

To start, make an empty directory, say node-webkit, then create the .gclient file in it, its content should be:

solutions = [
  {
    "name"        : "src",
    "url"         : "https://github.com/nwjs/chromium.src.git@origin/nw12",
    "deps_file"   : "DEPS",
    "managed"     : True,
    "custom_deps" : {
      "src/third_party/WebKit/LayoutTests": None,
      "src/chrome_frame/tools/test/reference_build/chrome": None,
      "src/chrome_frame/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_win": None,
      "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome": None,
      "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_linux": None,
      "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_mac": None,
      "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_win": None,
    },
    "safesync_url": "",
  },
]

Building your own forked version of node-webkit

These instructions will help you build a custom version of node-webkit that you have forked off the main version.

First, create a fork of chromium.src.

Next, edit DEPS by changing the value of deps['src/content/nw'] from https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit.git@origin/master to the URL of your forked version of node-webkit.

Then, if you have added any dependencies to the project, make sure to specify them in the appropriate gyp file (these are located in the build directory).

Now, on your workstation make an empty directory, say node-webkit, then create the .gclient file in it, its content should be:

solutions = [
  {
    "name"        : "src",
    "url"         : "https://github.com/YOUR-NAME-HERE/chromium.src.git@origin/nw12",
    "deps_file"   : "DEPS",
    "managed"     : True,
    "custom_deps" : {
      "src/third_party/WebKit/LayoutTests": None,
      "src/chrome_frame/tools/test/reference_build/chrome": None,
      "src/chrome_frame/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_win": None,
      "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome": None,
      "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_linux": None,
      "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_mac": None,
      "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_win": None,
    },
    "safesync_url": "",
  },
]

Syncing code

Finally sync code under node-webkit directory (where .gclient resides), it would spend a few hours depending on your network condition:

gclient sync

If you are not interested in the repo history and don't want to wait hours or have a slow/flaky internet connection, you can use the --no-history flag

gclient sync --no-history

Notes

On OSX you'll see error messages reporting cycle in .gyp file dependency graph detected. It can be ignored because gclient wants to run gyp_chromium without a switch we need. Please move on to the Build section.

Assume you store code under node-webkit folder, after all code is downloaded by gclient, our final directory architecture will be like:

node-webkit/
|-- .gclient
`-- src/
    |-- many-stuff
    |-- ...
    `-- content
        |-- ...
        `-- nw  (source code of this repo)

Note: if you're on Linux and you get any dependency errors during gclient sync (like 'nss' or 'gtk+-2.0'), run ./src/build/install-build-deps.sh, then re-run gclient sync:

cd /path/to/node-webkit
# Do this to boot strap dependencies on Linux:
gclient sync --nohooks
./src/build/install-build-deps.sh
gclient sync

If you encountered other problems, see UsingNewGit.

Extra Steps on Windows

If you're building node-webkit on Windows, you should copy DirectX SDK files into /path/to/node-webkit/src/third_party/directxsdk/files:

mkdir -p /path/to/node-webkit/src/third_party/directxsdk/files
cp -r /c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Microsoft\ DirectX\ SDK\ \(June\ 2010\)/* /path/to/node-webkit/src/third_party/directxsdk/files/

This step is necessary to get some DirectX dlls files extracted, and we mentioned it here because this is not documented in Chromium's site.

Build

After the gclient sync, project files should have be prepared. If not, you should manually run:

./build/gyp_chromium content/content.gyp   (on OSX the argument '--no-circular-check' is needed)

To build from latest NW13 branch, please use following command instead:

./build/gyp_chromium

Then you can just compile the nw target (and don't forget to build with Release mode):

Windows - Use ninja as described below. Currently building with Visual Studio (Open the Visual Studio solution file and build project nw under content) is reported broken.
Mac OS X - Use ninja as described bellow, XCode will die building node-webkit :(.
Linux - Run make -j4 nw BUILDTYPE=Release from the Chromium src directory.

Alternately, you can use ninja to build node-webkit, see NinjaBuild. This method is also recommended since it's very fast and easy to use. A short summary of using ninja is:

export GYP_GENERATORS='ninja'
./build/gyp_chromium content/content.gyp
ninja -C out/Release nw -j4

Since 0.12.0, NW.js supports multiple build flavors, such as MAS, NaCl, SDK and minimum build. To build those flavors, just add following switches to GYP_DEFINES and run ./build/gyp_chromium content/content.gyp before build your own NW.js.

SDK: nwjs_sdk=1 disable_nacl=0 since 0.13.0-alpha1
NaCl: disable_nacl=0 since 0.13.0-alpha1
Minimum: the default configuration, same as nwjs_sdk=0 disable_nacl=1 since 0.13.0-alpha1

Official extra build settings

Windows all: set DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0; set GYP_MSVS_VERSION=2013
Win64: set GYP_DEFINES='host_arch=x64 target_arch=x64' and build in src/out/Release_x64
Mac ia32: export GYP_DEFINES='host_arch=ia32'
Linux ia32: export GYP_DEFINES='clang=0'

You can view the official build environment settings and commands in the build log here: http://buildbot-master.node-webkit.org:8010/waterfall

Tips

You can specify what project files to generate through GYP_GENERATORS. And you can export it in ~/.bashrc etc.For example, if you want to use make:

export GYP_GENERATORS='make'
./build/gyp_chromium content/content.gyp

When you build on Mac, don't forget to pass --no-circular-check to generate project files:

export GYP_GENERATORS='ninja'
./build/gyp_chromium content/content.gyp --no-circular-check

Build Faster

Update to upstream

You can use gclient to update everything automatically:

cd /path-to-node-webkit
gclient sync

NW.js's code are in 6 git repos. To keep an eye on the commits, subscribe to our dev mailing list: node-webkit-dev+subscribe@googlegroups.com .

List of repos, they are the repos we're doing daily works on and there are no internal repos:

https://github.com/nwjs/node-webkit
https://github.com/nwjs/blink
https://github.com/nwjs/chromium.src
https://github.com/nwjs/breakpad
https://github.com/nwjs/v8
https://github.com/nwjs/node

branches

There are two branches for node-webkit: v0.8 branch and master branch. See https://groups.google.com/d/msg/node-webkit/2OJ1cEMPLlA/09BvpTagSA0J

The "default branch" is the branch name you see in the start page of github repos. Regarding the root Chromium repo, the current default branch is 'nw12'.

The branch names in dependency repos are specified in DEPS or .DEPS.git file in the root repo. The tool 'gclient' is supposed to sync them for you. But sometimes manual switching between branches might be needed.

Common Errors

If you receive the following error message when building:

Error: Command 'git checkout --quiet refs/remotes/origin/nw13' returned non-zero exit status 1 in /path/to/nwjs/src
error: pathspec 'refs/remotes/origin/nw13' did not match any file(s) known to git.

The path gives the key to the issue: /path/to/nwjs/src Go down to that folder and use the following commands. Use the following commands (unix)

cd /path/to/nwjs/src
git branch nw12
git checkout nw12

Download NW.js

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