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docs/development/build-system-overview.md
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# Build system overview
# Build System Overview
Electron uses `gyp` for project generation, and `ninja` for building, project
configurations can be found in `.gyp` and `.gypi` files.
Electron uses `gyp` for project generation and `ninja` for building. Project
configurations can be found in the `.gyp` and `.gypi` files.
## Gyp files
## Gyp Files
Following `gyp` files contain the main rules of building Electron:
Following `gyp` files contain the main rules for building Electron:
* `atom.gyp` defines how Electron itself is built.
* `common.gypi` adjusts the build configurations of Node to make it build
together with Chromium.
* `vendor/brightray/brightray.gyp` defines how `brightray` is built, and
includes the default configurations of linking with Chromium.
* `vendor/brightray/brightray.gyp` defines how `brightray` is built and
includes the default configurations for linking with Chromium.
* `vendor/brightray/brightray.gypi` includes general build configurations about
building.
## Component build
## Component Build
Since Chromium is quite a large project, the final linking stage would take
quite a few minutes, making it hard for development. In order to solve this,
Chromium introduced the "component build", which builds each component as a
separate shared library, making linking very quick but sacrificing file size
Since Chromium is quite a large project, the final linking stage can take
quite a few minutes, which makes it hard for development. In order to solve
this, Chromium introduced the "component build", which builds each component as
a separate shared library, making linking very quick but sacrificing file size
and performance.
In Electron we took a very similar approach: for `Debug` builds, the binary
will be linked to shared library version of Chromium's components to achieve
will be linked to a shared library version of Chromium's components to achieve
fast linking time; for `Release` builds, the binary will be linked to the static
library versions, so we can have the best possible binary size and performance.
## Minimal bootstrapping
## Minimal Bootstrapping
All of Chromium's prebuilt binaries(libchromiumcontent) are downloaded when
All of Chromium's prebuilt binaries (`libchromiumcontent`) are downloaded when
running the bootstrap script. By default both static libraries and shared
libraries will be downloaded and the final size should be between 800MB and 2GB
according to the platform.
depending on the platform.
By default, libchromiumcontent is downloaded from Amazon Web Services.
If the `LIBCHROMIUMCONTENT_MIRROR` environment variable is set, bootrstrap
By default, `libchromiumcontent` is downloaded from Amazon Web Services.
If the `LIBCHROMIUMCONTENT_MIRROR` environment variable is set, the bootstrap
script will download from it.
[libchromiumcontent-qiniu-mirror](https://github.com/hokein/libchromiumcontent-qiniu-mirror)
is a mirror for libchromiumcontent. If you have trouble in accessing AWS, you can
switch download address to it via `export LIBCHROMIUMCONTENT_MIRROR=http://7xk3d2.dl1.z0.glb.clouddn.com/`
[`libchromiumcontent-qiniu-mirror`](https://github.com/hokein/libchromiumcontent-qiniu-mirror)
is a mirror for `libchromiumcontent`. If you have trouble in accessing AWS, you
can switch the download address to it via
`export LIBCHROMIUMCONTENT_MIRROR=http://7xk3d2.dl1.z0.glb.clouddn.com/`
If you only want to build Electron quickly for testing or development, you
can only download the shared library versions by passing the `--dev` parameter:
can download just the shared library versions by passing the `--dev` parameter:
```bash
$ ./script/bootstrap.py --dev
$ ./script/build.py -c D
```
## Two-phrase project generation
## Two-Phrase Project Generation
Electron links with different sets of libraries in `Release` and `Debug`
builds, however `gyp` doesn't support configuring different link settings for
builds. `gyp`, however, doesn't support configuring different link settings for
different configurations.
To work around this Electron uses a `gyp` variable
`libchromiumcontent_component` to control which link settings to use, and only
`libchromiumcontent_component` to control which link settings to use and only
generates one target when running `gyp`.
## Target names
## Target Names
Unlike most projects that use `Release` and `Debug` as target names, Electron
uses `R` and `D` instead. This is because `gyp` randomly crashes if there is
only one `Release` or `Debug` build configuration is defined, and Electron has
to only generate one target for one time as stated above.
only one `Release` or `Debug` build configuration defined, and Electron only has
to generate one target at a time as stated above.
This only affects developers, if you are only building Electron for rebranding
This only affects developers, if you are just building Electron for rebranding
you are not affected.