Build Instructions (experimental GN build)

Follow the guidelines below for building Electron with the experimental GN build.

NOTE: The GN build system is in experimental status, and currently only works on macOS, Linux and Windows.

Prerequisites

Check the build prerequisites for your platform before proceeding

Install `depot_tools`

You'll need to install depot_tools, the toolset used for fetching Chromium and its dependencies.

Also, on windows open:

Control Panel → System and Security → System → Advanced system settings

and add a system variable DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN with value 0. This tells depot_tools to use your locally installed version of Visual Studio (by default, depot_tools will try to use a google-internal version).

Getting the Code

$ mkdir electron-gn && cd electron-gn
$ cat > .gclient <<-GCLIENT
solutions = [
  {
    "url": "https://github.com/electron/electron",
    "managed": False,
    "name": "src/electron",
  },
]
GCLIENT
$ gclient sync --with_branch_heads --with_tags
# This will take a while, go get a coffee.

Building

$ cd src
$ export CHROMIUM_BUILDTOOLS_PATH=`pwd`/buildtools
$ gn gen out/Default --args='import("//electron/build/args/debug.gn")'

This will generate a build directory out/Default under src/ with debug build configuration. You can replace Default with another name, but it should be a subdirectory of out. Also, to know the list of available configuration options, run gn args out/Default --list. Also you shouldn't have to run gn gen again—if you want to change the build arguments, you can run gn args out/Default to bring up an editor.

For generating Debug/Component build config of Electron:

$ gn gen out/Default --args='import("//electron/build/args/debug.gn")'

For generating Release/Non-Component build config of Electron:

$ gn gen out/Default --args='import("//electron/build/args/release.gn")'

To build, run ninja with the electron:electron_app target:

$ ninja -C out/Default electron:electron_app
# This will also take a while and probably heat up your lap.

This will build all of what was previously 'libchromiumcontent' (i.e. the content/ directory of chromium and its dependencies, incl. WebKit and V8), so it will take a while.

To speed up subsequent builds, you can use sccache. Add the GN arg cc_wrapper="sccache" by running gn args out/Default to bring up an editor.

The built executable will be under ./out/Default:

$ ./out/Default/Electron.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron
# or, on Linux
$ ./out/Default/electron

Cross-compiling

To compile for a platform that isn't the same as the one you're building on, set the target_cpu GN argument. For example, to compile a windows x86 target from an x64 host, specify target_cpu = "x86" in gn args.

$ gn gen out/Default-x86 --args='... target_cpu = "x86"'

Not all combinations of source and target CPU/OS are supported by Chromium. Only cross-compiling Windows 32-bit from Windows 64-bit has been tested in Electron. If you test other combinations and find them to work, please update this document :)

Tests

To run the tests, you'll first need to build the test modules against the same version of Node.js that was built as part of the build process. To generate build headers for the modules to compile against, run the following under src/ directory.

$ ninja -C out/Default electron/build/node:headers
# Install the test modules with the generated headers
$ (cd electron/spec && npm i --nodedir=../../out/Default/gen/node_headers)

Then, run Electron with electron/spec as the argument:

$ ./out/Default/Electron.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron electron/spec

If you're debugging something, it can be helpful to pass some extra flags to the Electron binary:

$ ./out/Default/Electron.app/Contents/MacOS/Electron electron/spec \
  --ci --enable-logging -g 'BrowserWindow module'

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