73 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
73 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
# Build System Overview
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Electron uses [gyp](https://gyp.gsrc.io/) for project generation and
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[ninja](https://ninja-build.org/) for building. Project configurations can
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be found in the `.gyp` and `.gypi` files.
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## Gyp Files
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Following `gyp` files contain the main rules for building Electron:
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* `electron.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 for 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 can take
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quite a few minutes, which makes it hard for development. In order to solve
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this, Chromium introduced the "component build", which builds each component as
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a 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 a 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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depending on 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, the bootstrap
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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
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can switch the download address to it via
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`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 download just 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-Phase Project Generation
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Electron links with different sets of libraries in `Release` and `Debug`
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builds. `gyp`, however, 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 defined, and Electron only has
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to generate one target at a time as stated above.
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This only affects developers, if you are just building Electron for rebranding
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you are not affected.
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