Checking out and building on Fuchsia

Note that the Fuchsia port is in the early stages, and things are likely to frequently be broken. Try #cr-fuchsia on Freenode if something seems awry.

There are instructions for other platforms linked from the get the code page.

System requirements

  • A 64-bit Intel machine with at least 8GB of RAM. More than 16GB is highly recommended.
  • At least 100GB of free disk space.
  • You must have Git and Python installed already.

Most development is done on Ubuntu.

Install depot_tools

Clone the depot_tools repository:

$ git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git

Add depot_tools to the end of your PATH (you will probably want to put this in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc). Assuming you cloned depot_tools to /path/to/depot_tools:

$ export PATH="$PATH:/path/to/depot_tools"

Get the code

Create a chromium directory for the checkout and change to it (you can call this whatever you like and put it wherever you like, as long as the full path has no spaces):

$ mkdir ~/chromium && cd ~/chromium

Run the fetch tool from depot_tools to check out the code and its dependencies.

$ fetch --nohooks chromium

If you don't want the full repo history, you can save a lot of time by adding the --no-history flag to fetch.

Expect the command to take 30 minutes on even a fast connection, and many hours on slower ones.

If you've already installed the build dependencies on the machine (from another checkout, for example), you can omit the --nohooks flag and fetch will automatically execute gclient runhooks at the end.

When fetch completes, it will have created a hidden .gclient file and a directory called src in the working directory.

Configure for building on Fuchsia

Edit .gclient to include (this is a list, so it could also include android, etc. if necessary.)

target_os = ['fuchsia']

Note that this should be added as a top-level statement in the .gclient file, not an entry inside the solutions dict.

You will then need to re-run gclient runhooks. This makes sure the Fuchsia SDK is available in third_party and keeps it up to date.

The remaining instructions assume you have switched to the src directory:

$ cd src

Setting up the build

Chromium uses Ninja as its main build tool along with a tool called GN to generate .ninja files. You can create any number of build directories with different configurations. To create a build directory, run:

$ gn gen out/fuchsia --args="is_debug=false dcheck_always_on=true is_component_build=false target_os=\"fuchsia\""

You can also build for Debug, with is_debug=true, but since we don't currently have any Debug build-bots, it may be more broken than Release.

use_goma=true is fine to use also if you're a Googler.

Build

Currently, not all targets build on Fuchsia. You can build base_unittests, for example:

$ ninja -C out/fuchsia base_unittests

Run

Once it is built, you can run by:

$ out/fuchsia/bin/run_base_unittests

This packages the built binary and test data into a disk image, and runs a QEMU instance from the Fuchsia SDK, outputting to the console.

Common gtest arguments such as --gtest_filter=... are supported by the run script.

The run script also symbolizes backtraces.

A useful alias (for “Build And Run Filtered”) is:

alias barf='ninja -C out/fuchsia base_unittests -j1000 && out/fuchsia/bin/run_base_unittests --test-launcher-filter-file=../../testing/buildbot/filters/fuchsia.base_unittests.filter'

to build and run only the tests that are not excluded/known-failing on the bot.