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