See build for instructions on how to build Blimp.
There are both Android and Linux clients. The Android client is the shipping client while the Linux client is used for development purposes.
To have the client connect to a custom engine use the --engine-ip, --engine-port, and --engine-transport flags. The possible valid values for --engine-transport are ‘tcp’ and ‘ssl’. An example valid endpoint would be --engine-ip=127.0.0.1 --engine-port=1234 --engine-transport=tcp.
SSL-encrypted connections take an additional flag --engine-cert-path which specifies a path to a PEM-encoded certificate file (e.g. --engine-cert-path=/path/to/file.pem.)
The engine sends partially rendered content to the client. To request the complete page from the engine, use the --download-whole-document flag on the client.
Install the Blimp APK with the following:
./build/android/adb_install_apk.py $(PRODUCT_DIR)/apks/Blimp.apk
Set up any command line flags with:
./build/android/adb_blimp_command_line --your-flag-here
To see your current command line, run adb_blimp_command_line without any arguments.
Run the Blimp APK with:
./build/android/adb_run_blimp_client
The blimp client is built as part of the blimp target. To run it with local logging enabled, execute:
./out-linux/Debug/blimp_shell \ --user-data-dir=/tmp/blimpclient \ --enable-logging=stderr \ --vmodule="*=1"
For running the engine in a container, see container.
To run the engine on a workstation and make your Android client connect to it, you need to forward a port from the Android device to the host, and also instruct the client to connect using that port on its localhost address.
If you are running the engine on your workstation and are connected to the client device via USB, you'll need remote port forwarding to allow the Blimp client to talk to your computer.
Follow the remote debugging instructions to get started. You'll probably want to remap 25467 to “localhost:25467”. Note This requires the separate Chrome application to be running on the device. Otherwise you will not see the green light for the port forwarding.
If you are having issues with using the built-in Chrome port forwarding, you can also start a new shell and keep the following command running:
./build/android/adb_reverse_forwarder.py --debug -v 25467 25467
--blimp-client-token-path=$PATH: Path to a file containing a nonempty token string. If this is not present, the engine will fail to boot.--use-remote-compositing: Ensures that the renderer uses the remote compositor.--disable-cached-picture-raster: Ensures that rasterized content is not destroyed before serialization.--android-fonts-path=$PATH: Path to where the fonts are located. Typically this would be out-linux/Debug/gen/third_party/blimp_fonts.--disable-remote-fonts: Disables downloading of custom web fonts in the renderer.When the client connects to a manually specified engine instead of using the assigner, it will use a dummy token. The engine needs to know what this token is, so it must be provided using the --blimp-client-token-path flag. The token is available in the constant kDummyClientToken in blimp/client/session/assignment_source.h. You can easily store that to a file by running the following command once:
awk '{if ( match($0, /^\s*const char kDummyClientToken.*/) ) { print substr($5, 2, length($5)-3);} }' \ ./blimp/client/session/assignment_source.h > /tmp/blimpengine-token
Then start the engine using these flags:
out-linux/Debug/blimp_engine_app \ --use-remote-compositing \ --disable-cached-picture-raster \ --blimp-client-token-path=/tmp/blimpengine-token \ --user-data-dir=/tmp/blimpengine \ --android-fonts-path=out-linux/Debug/gen/third_party/blimp_fonts \ --enable-logging=stderr \ --vmodule="blimp*=1"