A non-profit community-maintained Brave browser without any adware or crypto tokens.

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This repository holds the build tools needed to build the Braver 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

Please see the contributing guidelines

Follow @braver on Twitter for important news and announcements.

Follow the instructions for your platform:

• macOS
• Windows
• Linux/Android

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

git clone [email protected]:braver-browser/braver-browser.git
cd braver-browser
npm install

# this takes 30-45 minutes to run
# the Chromium source is downloaded which has a large history
npm run init

# if you'd like to run it faster without downloading Chromium's source history
npm run init --no-history

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 android
npm config set target_arch arm

The default build type is component.

# start the component build compile
npm run build

To do a release build:

# start the release compile
npm 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

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]].

To start the build:

npm start [Release|Component|Static|Debug]

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):

1. 📥 Update sub-projects (chromium, brave-core) to latest commit of a git ref (e.g. tag or branch)
2. 🤕 Apply patches
3. 🔄 Update gclient DEPS dependencies
4. ⏩ Run hooks (e.g. to perform npm install on child projects)

Run npm run sync brave_core_ref to checkout the specified brave-core ref and update all dependent repos including chromium if needed

brave-core> git checkout -b branch_name

or

braver-browser> npn run sync -- --create branch_name

braver-core> git fetch origin
braver-core> git checkout [-b] branch_name
braver-core> npm run sync
...Updating 2 patches...
...Updating child dependencies...
...Running hooks...

or

braver-browser> npn run sync --create branch_name
...Updating 2 patches...
...Updating child dependencies...
...Running hooks...

braver-core> git pull
braver-core> npm run sync
...Updating 2 patches...
...Updating child dependencies...
...Running hooks...

braver-browser> git checkout master
braver-browser> git pull
braver-browser> npm run sync -- --init

braver-core> git checkout featureB
braver-core> git pull
braver-browser> npm run apply_patches
...Applying 2 patches...

See Troubleshooting for solutions to common problems.