Linux-specific build instructions

Common checkout instructions

This page covers Linux-specific setup and configuration. The general checkout instructions cover installing depot tools and checking out the code via git.

Overview

Due its complexity, Chromium uses a set of custom tools to check out and build rather than configure/make like most projects. You must use gclient and ninja, and there is no “install” step provided.

System requirements

64-bits: x86 builds are not supported on Linux.
Memory: >16GB is highly recommended.
Disk space: Expect a full checkout and build to take nearly 100GB.
Distribution: 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.

Software setup

Non-Ubuntu distributions are not officially supported for building and the instructions below might be outdated.

Ubuntu

Once you have checked out the code, run build/install-build-deps.sh The script only supports current releases as listed on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases. This script is used to set up the canonical builders, and as such is the most up to date reference for the required prerequisites.

Debian

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:

libexpat-dev -> libexpat1-dev
freetype-dev -> libfreetype6-dev
libbzip2-dev -> libbz2-dev
libcupsys2-dev -> libcups2-dev

Additionally, if you‘re building Chromium components for Android, you’ll need to install the package: lib32z1

openSUSE

For openSUSE 11.0 and later, see Linux openSUSE Build Instructions.

Fedora

Recent systems:

su -c 'yum install git python bzip2 tar pkgconfig atk-devel alsa-lib-devel \
bison binutils brlapi-devel bluez-libs-devel bzip2-devel cairo-devel \
cups-devel dbus-devel dbus-glib-devel expat-devel fontconfig-devel \
freetype-devel gcc-c++ GConf2-devel glib2-devel glibc.i686 gperf \
glib2-devel gtk2-devel gtk3-devel java-1.*.0-openjdk-devel libatomic \
libcap-devel libffi-devel libgcc.i686 libgnome-keyring-devel libjpeg-devel \
libstdc++.i686 libX11-devel libXScrnSaver-devel libXtst-devel \
libxkbcommon-x11-devel ncurses-compat-libs nspr-devel nss-devel pam-devel \
pango-devel pciutils-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel zlib.i686 httpd mod_ssl \
php php-cli python-psutil wdiff'

The msttcorefonts packages can be obtained by following the instructions present here. For the optional packages:

php-cgi is provided by the php-cli package
sun-java6-fonts doesn't exist in Fedora repositories, needs investigating

Arch Linux

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:

php-cgi is provided with pacman
wdiff is not in the main repository but dwdiff is. You can get wdiff in AUR/yaourt
sun-java6-fonts do not seem to be in main repository or AUR.

Mandriva

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

msttcorefonts are not available, you will need to build your own (see instructions, not hard to do, see mandriva_msttcorefonts.md) or use drakfont to import the fonts from a windows installation
These packages are for 64 bit, to download the 32 bit packages, substitute lib64 with lib
Some of these packages might not be explicitly necessary as they come as dependencies, there is no harm in including them however.

Gentoo

emerge www-client/chromium

Troubleshooting

Linker Crashes

If, during the final link stage:

LINK out/Debug/chrome

You get an error like:

collect2: ld terminated with signal 6 Aborted terminate called after throwing an
instance of 'std::bad_alloc'

collect2: ld terminated with signal 11 [Segmentation fault], core dumped

you are probably running out of memory when linking. You must use a 64-bit system to build. Try the following build settings (see GN build configuration for setting):

Build in release mode (debugging symbols require more memory). is_debug = false
Turn off symbols. symbol_level = 0
Build in component mode (this is for developers only, it will be slower and may have broken functionality). is_component_build = true

Next Steps

If you want to contribute to the effort toward a Chromium-based browser for Linux, please check out the Linux Development page for more information.