This page covers Windows-specific setup and configuration. The general checkout instructions cover installing depot tools and checking out the code via git.
You must set your Windows system locale to English, or else you may get build errors about “The file contains a character that cannot be represented in the current code page.”
You must build with Visual Studio 2015 Update 2; no other version is supported.
You must have Windows 7 x64 or later. x86 OSs are unsupported.
Follow the appropriate path below:
As of March 11, 2016 Chromium requires Visual Studio 2015 to build.
Install Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 or later - Community Edition should work if its license is appropriate for you. Use the Custom Install option and select:
You must have the 10586 SDK installed or else you will hit compile errors such as redefined macros.
Install Windows Driver Kit (WDK) 10, or use some other method to get the Debugging Tools for Windows.
Run set DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0, or set that variable in your global environment.
Compilation is done through ninja, not Visual Studio.
Run: download_from_google_storage --config and follow the authentication instructions. Note that you must authenticate with your @google.com credentials, not @chromium.org. Enter “0” if asked for a project-id.
Run: gclient sync again to download and install the toolchain automatically.
The toolchain will be in depot_tools\win_toolchain\vs_files\<hash>, and windbg can be found in depot_tools\win_toolchain\vs_files\<hash>\win_sdk\Debuggers.
If you want the IDE for debugging and editing, you will need to install it separately, but this is optional and not needed to build Chromium.
If you want to use the Visual Studio IDE, use the --ide command line argument to gn gen when you generate your output directory (as described on the get the code page):
devenv out\Default\all.sln
GN will produce a file all.sln in your build directory. It will internally use Ninja to compile while still allowing most IDE functions to work (there is no native Visual Studio compilation mode). If you manually run “gen” again you will need to resupply this argument, but normally GN will keep the build and IDE files up to date automatically when you build.
The generated solution will contain several thousand projects and will be very slow to load. Use the --filters argument to restrict generating project files for only the code you're interested in, although this will also limit what files appear in the project explorer. A minimal solution that will let you compile and run Chrome in the IDE but will not show any source files is:
gn gen --ide=vs --filters=//chrome out\Default
There are other options for controlling how the solution is generated, run gn help gen for the current documentation.
is_component_build = true. This will generate many DLLs and enable incremental linking, which makes linking much faster in Debug.Still, expect build times of 30 minutes to 2 hours when everything has to be recompiled.