Brave Browser

Overview

This repository holds the build tools needed to build the Brave desktop browser for macOS, Windows, and Linux. In particular, it fetches and syncs code from the projects we define in package.json and src/brave/DEPS:

• Chromium
  • Fetches code via depot_tools.
  • sets the branch for Chromium (ex: 65.0.3325.181).
• brave-core
  • Mounted at src/brave.
  • Maintains patches for 3rd party Chromium code.
• adblock-rust
  • Implements Brave's ad-block engine.
  • Linked through brave/adblock-rust-ffi

Downloads

You can visit our website to get the latest stable release.

Other repositories

For other versions of our browser, please see:

• iOS - brave/brave-ios

Contributing

Please see the contributing guidelines

Community

Join the Q&A community if you'd like to get more involved with Brave. You can ask for help,discuss features you'd like to see, and a lot more. We'd love to have your help so that we can continue improving Brave.

Help us translate Brave to your language by submitting translations at https://www.transifex.com/brave/brave/

Follow @brave on Twitter for important news and announcements.

Install prerequisites

Follow the instructions for your platform:

• macOS
• Windows
• Linux/Android

Clone and initialize the repo

Once you have the prerequisites installed, you can get the code and initialize the build environment.

git clone [email protected]:brave/brave-browser.gitcd brave-browsernpm install# this takes 30-45 minutes to run# the Chromium source is downloaded which has a large historynpm run init

brave-core based android builds should use npm run init -- --target_os=android --target_arch=arm (or whatever cpu type you want to build for)

You can also set the target_os and target_arch for init and build using

npm config set target_os androidnpm config set target_arch arm

Build Brave

The default build type is component.

# start the component build compilenpm run build

To do a release build:

# start the release compilenpm run build Release

brave-core based android builds should use npm run build -- --target_os=android --target_arch=arm or set the npm config variables as specified above for init

Build Configurations

Running a release build with npm run build Release can be very slow and use a lot of RAM especially on Linux with the Gold LLVM plugin.

To run a statically linked build (takes longer to build, but starts faster)

npm run build -- Static

To run a debug build (Component build with is_debug=true)

npm run build -- Debug

You may also want to try [[using sccache|sccache-for-faster-builds]].

Run Brave

To start the build:

npm start [Release|Component|Static|Debug]

Update Brave

npm run sync -- [--force] [--init] [--create] [brave_core_ref]

This will attempt to stash your local changes in brave-core, but it's safer to commit local changes before running this

npm run sync will (depending on the below flags):