Building node webkit - Hosting-Site/node-webkit GitHub Wiki
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.
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.
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/rogerwang/chromium.src.git@origin/nw",
"deps_file" : ".DEPS.git",
"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": "",
},
]
Finally sync code under node-webkit
directory (where .gclient
resides), it would spend a few hours depending on your network condition:
gclient sync
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)
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 projectnw
undercontent
) is reported broken. - Mac OS X - Use
ninja
as described bellow, XCode will die buildingnode-webkit
:(. - Linux - Run
make -j4 nw BUILDTYPE=Release
from the Chromiumsrc
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
##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 usemake
:
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
node-webkit's code are in 6 git repos. To keep an eye on the commits, subscribe to our dev mailing list: [email protected] .
List of node-webkit repos, they are the repos we're doing daily works on and there are no internal repos:
https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit
https://github.com/rogerwang/blink
https://github.com/rogerwang/chromium.src
https://github.com/rogerwang/breakpad
https://github.com/rogerwang/v8
https://github.com/rogerwang/node
branches
There are two branches for node-webkit: v0.8 branch and master (v0.9) branch. See https://groups.google.com/d/msg/node-webkit/2OJ1cEMPLlA/09BvpTagSA0J
The root repo and some of the dependency repos use the default branch for 0.9 starting from Feb 11, 2014. Previously the default branch was used for 0.8 branch.
The "default branch" is the branch name you see in the start page of github repos. Regarding the root Chromium repo, the default branch is 'nw'. It was switched from 0.8 to 0.9 on Feb 11, 2014.
The branch names in dependency repos are specified in '.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.