Building NW.js {: .doctitle}
Important
Starting from 0.17, we switched to the new build configuration system GN and Ninja in Chromium upstream. The Node.js in NW is still build with GYP/Ninja
This document is written for latest NW 0.13 or later. For legacy build instructions, please read the wiki page on GitHub.
See our buildbot for official build configuration and steps: http://buildbot-master.nwjs.io:8010/waterfall
Debug version should be built with component build configuration. See the discussion in upstream.
Prerequisites
NW.js use same build tools and similar steps as Chromium. Read the instructions according to your platform to install depot_tools
and other prerequistes:
Windows
As suggested by Chromium document, you need to run set DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0
or set the variable in your global environment.
Xcode 7
Mac SDK 10.11 as part of Xcode 7 is not supported yet. If you have upgraded to Xcode 7, either downgrade to Xcode 6 or copy Mac SDK 10.10 from other machines under `xcode-select -p`/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs
as suggested by Chromium document.
Get the Code
Step 1. Create a folder for holding NW.js source code, like $HOME/nwjs
, and run following command in the folder to generate .gclient
file:
mkdir -p $HOME/nwjs
cd $HOME/nwjs
gclient config --name=src https://github.com/nwjs/chromium.src.git@origin/nw17
Generally if you are not interested in running Chromium tests, you don’t have to sync the test cases and reference builds, which saves you lot of time. Open the .gclient
file you just created and replace custom_deps
section with followings:
"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,
}
Manually clone and checkout correct branches for following repositories:
path | repo |
---|---|
src/content/nw | https://github.com/nwjs/nw.js |
src/third_party/node-nw | https://github.com/nwjs/node |
src/v8 | https://github.com/nwjs/v8 |
Step 2. Run following command in your terminal:
gclient sync --with_branch_heads
This usually downloads 20G+ from GitHub and Google’s Git repos. Make sure you have a good network provider and be patient :stuck_out_tongue:
When finished, you will see a src
folder created in the same folder as .gclient
.
First Build on Linux
If you are building on Linux for the first time, you need to run gclient sync --with_branch_heads --nohooks
and then run ./build/install-build-deps.sh
to install dependencies on Ubuntu. See Chromium document for detailed instructions of getting the source code.
Generate ninja build files with GN for Chromium
cd src
gn gen out/nw (changing the 'nw' part of the path is not supported. You'd better not changing the 'out' part if you're new to this)
Use flags like our official build:
is_debug=false
is_component_ffmpeg=true
target_cpu="x64"
We support component build: is_component_build = true
for faster development cycle. It should be used when you are trying to build debug version.
See the upstream documentation for the mapping between GN and GYP flags: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/tools/gn/docs/cookbook.md#Variable-mappings
Generate ninja build files with GYP for Node
cd src
GYP_CHROMIUM_NO_ACTION=0 ./build/gyp_chromium -I third_party/node-nw/common.gypi -D building_nw=1 third_party/node-nw/node.gyp
or use the following if you’re doing a component build:
./build/gyp_chromium -D component=shared_library -I third_party/node-nw/common.gypi -D building_nw=1 third_party/node-nw/node.gyp
To change the build configuration for Node, you need to setup the GYP_DEFINES environment variable:
32-bit/64-bit Build
- Windows
- 32-bit: is the default build target
- 64-bit:
set GYP_DEFINES="target_arch=x64"
and rebuild inout/Debug_x64
orout/Release_x64
folder
- Linux
- 32-bit: TODO: chroot
- 64-bit: is the default build target
- Mac
- 32-bit:
export GYP_DEFINES="host_arch=ia32 target_arch=ia32"
and rebuild inout/Debug
orout/Release
folder - 64-bit: is the default build target
- 32-bit:
Build nwjs
ninja build files are generated in out/nw
folder after you run GN. Run following command in your terminal will generate the Debug build of standard NW.js binaries in out/nw
folder:
cd src
ninja -C out/nw nwjs
Build Time
Generally a full build takes hours of time depending on the performance of your machine. Recommended configuration is to build on a PC with multicore CPU (>=8 cores), SSD and large memory (>= 8G). And you can read Build Faster section below for some tips to speed up the build.
To build 32-bit/64-bit binaries or non-standard build flavors, you need to edit out/nw/args.gn file And then re-run the commands above to generate binaries.
Build Node
cd src
ninja -C out/Release node
After building Node, the final step is to copy the build Node library to the nwjs binary folder:
cd src
ninja -C out/nw copy_node
Build Flavors
- Standard: ‘nwjs_sdk=false’
- SDK:
enable_nacl=true
See Build Flavors for the differences of all supported build flavors.
Enable Proprietary Codecs
Due to the license issue, the prebuilt binaries of NW.js doesn’t support proprietary codecs, like H.264. So you can’t play MP3/MP4 with <audio>
and <video>
tags with prebuilt NW.js. To enable those medias, you have to build NW.js from source code by following the document of Enable Proprietary Codecs.
Build Faster
From Google’s website, there are a few tips to speed up your build. Open the links below to see the tips for your platform: