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Windows Development Environment

Mihai PLESA edited this page Nov 13, 2022 · 48 revisions

System Requirements

Before you begin, make sure your system satisfies the system requirements.

Set up Windows

Visual Studio

Install the latest version of Visual Studio Community. At the editing of this wiki, that is version 2019. Follow guidance from the "Visual Studio" section of the Chromium Windows build instructions.

Windows 10 SDK

Install Windows 10 SDK 10.0.20348.0. (VS2017 installer does not include this version.)

See also https://github.com/google/omaha/blob/main/doc/DeveloperSetupGuide.md#currently-the-supported-toolchain-is-visual-studio-2019-update-161110-and-windows-sdk-100220000

Git

Install Git from https://git-scm.com/downloads.

Configure Git according to the "Get the Code" section of the Chromium Windows build instructions, specifically all of the git config --global commands.

Node

Install the Node.js active LTS (v16+) from https://nodejs.org/.

npm or Yarn

Preferably use npm v8+ (but < 8.6) as it is the default package manager used across our builds. npm is built in Node by default. Alternatively, you can install Yarn:

Install Yarn from https://yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/install/. Installing Yarn via .msi has been tested and is known to work.

If you'd like to use yarn instead of npm you can use yarn import to create a yarn.lock file from our package-lock.json.

Python 2.7

Install the latest Python 2.7 release from https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/.

Done!

Now you are ready to follow the next step of the build instructions in the wiki.

Running Brave

It's always best to run Brave from a standard cmd.exe shell or via Windows Explorer. There are instances where debug builds of Brave attempt to log to stderr, which will fail and potentially result in unexpected crashes in non-standard shells (e.g., Cygwin, Git for Windows, etc.)

Troubleshooting

The upstream documentation for Checking out and Building Chromium on Windows have a lot of useful information on configuring Windows, resolving common problems, speeding up builds, etc.

Clone the Brave repository to C:\

We recommend cloning the brave-browser Git repository to the top level of your C:\ drive because:

  • Some developers have encountered problems with paths exceeding 256 chars when the repository is cloned to a subdirectory.
  • Some developers have encountered problems with paths that contain spaces (e.g. the path to your home directory, if your username contains spaces) and some of Chromium's build tools.

Clone this wiki locally