Building node webkit

Our compilation will follow Chromium's standard, by using gclient and gyp, be sure to read following documentations before you continue, they contained required knowledge to build node-webkit.

• Get the Code - the usage of gclient
• UsingNewGit - steps of syncing code

And choose the instructions for your platform, they contained important building conventions.

• Build Instructions for Windows
• Build instructions for Linux
• Build instructions for Mac OS X

Prerequisite

1. Get the Chromium depot_tools.
2. Setup building enviroment, see Build Instructions above.

Get the Code

node-webkit is now a part of our custom Chromium, that means the way we get node-webkit is mostly the same with Chromium, following steps are indeed modified from the Get the Code.

First find a place to put our code, it will take up about 14G disk space after compilation. Assume you store code under node-webkit folder, our final directory architecture will be like:

node-webkit/
|-- .gclient
`-- src/
    |-- many-stuff
    |-- ...
    `-- content
        |-- ...
        `-- nw

Then create the .gclient file under node-webkit, its content should be:

solutions = [
   { "name"        : "src",
     "url"         : "https://github.com/zcbenz/chromium.git@origin/node",
     "deps_file"   : ".DEPS.git",
     "managed"     : True,
     "custom_deps" : {
       "src/third_party/WebKit/LayoutTests": None,
       "src/chrome_frame/tools/test/reference_build/chrome": None,
       "src/chrome_frame/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_win": None,
       "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome": None,
       "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_linux": None,
       "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_mac": None,
       "src/chrome/tools/test/reference_build/chrome_win": None,
     },
     "safesync_url": "",
   },
]

Finally sync code under node-webkit directory (where .gclient resides), it would spend a few hours depending on your network condition:

gclient sync

Note: if you're on Linux and you get any dependency errors during gclient sync (like 'nss' or 'gtk+-2.0'), run ./src/build/install-build-deps.sh, then re-run gclient sync:

cd /path/to/node-webkit
# Do this to boot strap dependencies on Linux:
gclient sync --nohooks
./src/build/install-build-deps.sh
gclient sync

If you encountered other problems, see UsingNewGit.

Extra Steps on Windows

If you're building node-webkit on Windows, you should copy DirectX SDK files into /path/to/node-webkit/src/third_party/directxsdk/files:

mkdir -p /path/to/node-webkit/src/third_party/directxsdk/files
cp -r /c/Program\ Files\ \(x86\)/Microsoft\ DirectX\ SDK\ \(June\ 2010\)/* /path/to/node-webkit/src/third_party/directxsdk/files/

This step is necessary to get some DirectX dlls files extracted, and we mentioned it here because this is not documented in Chromium's site.

Build

After the gclient sync, project files should have be prepared. If not, you should manually run:

./build/gyp_chromium

Then you can just compile the nw target (and don't forget to build with Release mode):

• Windows - Open the Visual Studio solution file and build project nw under content.
• Mac OS X - Use ninja as described bellow, XCode will die building node-webkit :(.
• Linux - Run make -j4 nw BUILDTYPE=Release from the Chromium src directory.

Alternately, you can use ninja to build node-webkit, see NinjaBuild. This method is also recommended since it's very fast and easy to use. A short summary of using ninja is:

GYP_GENERATORS='ninja' ./build/gyp_chromium
ninja -C out/Release nw -j4

Build Faster

• Build Instructions for Windows
• LinuxFasterBuilds
• WindowsPrecompiledHeaders

Update to upstream

You can use gclient to update everything automatically:

cd /path-to-node-webkit
gclient sync