Home

Everything you need to build Brave.

• Desktop product roadmap
• Release information

Build Instructions

Install prerequisites

Follow the instructions for your platform:

• macOS
• Windows
• Linux

Clone and initialize the repo

Once you have the prerequisites installed, you can get the code and initialize the build environment.

git clone git@github.com:brave/brave-browser.git
cd brave-browser
npm install

# this takes 30-45 minutes to run
# the Chromium source is downloaded which has a large history
npm run init

Build Brave

The default build is debug.

# start the debug compile
npm run build

To do a release build:

# start the release compile
npm run build Release

Speed up the builds

Running a release build with npm run build Release can be very slow and use a lot of RAM especially on Linux with the Gold LLVM plugin. To speed things up we recommend doing a build with debug symbols and without being an official build. Instead you'd run npm run build Release --debug_build=true --official_build=false.

For incremental builds only, pass --no_branding_update to skip the branding update and build fewer files. If you see the following error, it means the branding update is required (i.e., you must not pass the flag to skip it):

ninja: error: '../../components/components_brave_strings.grd', needed by
'obj/components/strings/components_chromium_strings_grit.inputdeps.stamp', missing and no known rule to make it

You may also want to try using sccache.

Run Brave

To start debug build:

npm start

To start release build:

npm start Release

Staying up to date

You can run npm run sync -- --all to grab the latest source. It's important to note that this will overwrite your local changes, so please back up work before running this. This typically triggers a full rebuild. If you'd prefer to manually update, you can re-run the brave-core patches by running npm run sync -- --run_hooks.