Building node webkit - xiechao00/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.

• Build Instructions for Windows
• Build instructions for Linux
• Build instructions for Mac OS X

Prerequisite

1. Get the Chromium depot_tools.
2. Setup building enviroment, see Build Instructions above.

Starting from v0.11.0, it's required to use at least VS2013 Pro update 2 to build on windows. And see also the section 'Official extra build settings' below.

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.

Getting main version of node-webkit

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": "",
   },
]

Getting forked version of node-webkit

These instructions will help you build a custom version of node-webkit that you have forked off the main version.

First, create a fork of chromium.src.

Next, edit .DEPS.git by changing the value of deps['src/content/nw'] from https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit.git@origin/master to the URL of your forked version of node-webkit.

Then, if you have added any dependencies to the project, make sure to specify them in the appropriate gyp file (these are located in the build directory).

Now, on your workstation 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/YOUR-NAME-HERE/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": "",
   },
]

Syncing code

Finally sync code under node-webkit directory (where .gclient resides), it would spend a few hours depending on your network condition:

gclient sync

Notes

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 project nw under content) is reported broken.
• Mac OS X - Use ninja as described bellow, XCode will die building node-webkit :(.
• Linux - Run make -j4 nw BUILDTYPE=Release from the Chromium src 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

Official extra build settings

Windows all: set DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0; set GYP_MSVS_VERSION=2013
Win64: set GYP_DEFINES='host_arch=x64 target_arch=x64' and build in src/out/Release_x64
Mac ia32: export GYP_DEFINES='host_arch=ia32'
Linux ia32: export GYP_DEFINES='clang=0'

##Tips

1. 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 use make:

export GYP_GENERATORS='make'
./build/gyp_chromium content/content.gyp

2. 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

• Build Instructions for Windows
• LinuxFasterBuilds
• WindowsPrecompiledHeaders

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.