Linux Development Environment

System Requirements

Before you begin, ensure your system satisfies the system requirements.

Install additional build dependencies

You will need Git, Python 2.7, the LTS version NodeJS, and npm.

Alternatively to npm, you can also use Yarn. We recommend following the Yarn install docs to install Yarn and a compatible version of NodeJS. After installing yarn you'll want to run yarn import to create a yarn.lock file from our package-lock.json.

If you are using Ubuntu, additionally install:

apt-get install build-essential libgnome-keyring-dev python-setuptools npm

You are now ready to clone and initialize the repo. After npm run init is finished, there is one final step to finish installing build dependencies. This shell script only works on Debian and Ubuntu but check system requirements for other distros:

# cd to brave-browser repo root
./src/build/install-build-deps.sh

You might also want to try ./src/build/install-build-deps.sh --unsupported if above command gives an error about using a non supported Linux distribution.

Use ./src/build/install-build-deps-android.sh for android builds

Troubleshooting

Check out the upstream Checking out and building Chromium on Linux docs before filing an issue.

Making debug build for Android

If you are building debug apk for Android and doing debugging, you may want to add --gn=enable_proguard_obfuscation:false to build command:

npm run build -- --target_os=android --target_arch=arm --gn=enable_proguard_obfuscation:false

This will give you nice stacks from Java crashes or exceptions without need to run retrace script.

Installing a build on Android

Both for devices and if you have a started emulator:

./src/build/android/adb_install_apk.py ./src/out/android_Debug_x86/apks/Bravex86.apk