This page describes system requirements for building Chromium on Linux.
You should be able to build Chromium on any reasonably modern Linux distribution, but there are a lot of distributions and we sometimes break things on one or another. Internally, our development platform has been a variant of Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr); we expect you will have the most luck on this platform, although directions for other popular platforms are included below.
It takes about 10GB or so of disk space to check out and build the source tree. This number grows over time.
It takes about 8GB of swap file to link chromium and its tests. If you get an out-of-memory error during the final link, you will need to add swap space with swapon. It's recommended to have at least 4GB of memory available for building a statically linked debug build. Dynamic linking and/or building a release build lowers memory requirements. People with less than 8GB of memory may want to not build tests since they are quite large.
Chromium can be compiled as either a 32-bit or 64-bit application. Chromium requires several system libraries to compile and run. While it is possible to compile and run a 32-bit Chromium on 64-bit Linux, many distributions are missing the necessary 32-bit libraries, and will result in build or run-time errors.
Before setting up the environment, make sure you install the depot tools first.
Run build/install-build-deps.sh The script only supports current releases as listed on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases.
Building on Linux requires software not usually installed with the distributions.
The script attempts to automate installing the required software. This script is used to set up the canonical builders, and as such is the most up to date reference for the required prerequisites.
Note: Other distributions are not officially supported for building and the instructions below might be outdated.
Follow the Ubuntu instructions above.
If you want to install the build-deps manually, note that the original packages are for Ubuntu. Here are the Debian equivalents:
Additionally, if you‘re building Chromium components for Android, you’ll need to install the package: lib32z1
For openSUSE 11.0 and later, see Linux openSUSE Build Instructions.
Recent systems:
su -c 'yum install subversion pkgconfig python perl gcc-c++ bison \ flex gperf nss-devel nspr-devel gtk2-devel glib2-devel freetype-devel \ atk-devel pango-devel cairo-devel fontconfig-devel GConf2-devel \ dbus-devel alsa-lib-devel libX11-devel expat-devel bzip2-devel \ dbus-glib-devel elfutils-libelf-devel libjpeg-devel \ mesa-libGLU-devel libXScrnSaver-devel \ libgnome-keyring-devel cups-devel libXtst-devel libXt-devel pam-devel'
The msttcorefonts packages can be obtained by following the instructions present here: http://www.fedorafaq.org/#installfonts
For the optional packages:
php-cgi is provided by the php-cli package
wdiff doesn't exist in Fedora repositories, a possible alternative would be dwdiff
sun-java6-fonts doesn't exist in Fedora repositories, needs investigating
su -c ‘yum install httpd mod_ssl php php-cli wdiff’
Most of these packages are probably already installed since they're often used, and the parameter --needed ensures that packages up to date are not reinstalled.
sudo pacman -S --needed python perl gcc gcc-libs bison flex gperf pkgconfig \ nss alsa-lib gconf glib2 gtk2 nspr ttf-ms-fonts freetype2 cairo dbus \ libgnome-keyring
For the optional packages on Arch Linux:
For a successful build, add 'remove_webcore_debug_symbols': 1, to the variables-object in include.gypi. Tested on 64-bit Arch Linux.
TODO: Figure out how to make it build with the WebCore debug symbols. make V=1 can be useful for solving the problem.
urpmi lib64fontconfig-devel lib64alsa2-devel lib64dbus-1-devel \ lib64GConf2-devel lib64freetype6-devel lib64atk1.0-devel lib64gtk+2.0_0-devel \ lib64pango1.0-devel lib64cairo-devel lib64nss-devel lib64nspr-devel g++ python \ perl bison flex subversion gperf
emerge www-client/chromium