My chromium development env

Intended to be used as root/container directory for chromium development files (source files, tools, configuration and other kind of files involved), this repo provides a set of shell helper functions/scripts to speedup bootstrap, setting up, building and running chrome and other chromium artifacts/tools.

Tested only on Arch Linux with recent versions of bash and zsh

A common setup would be cloning it in $HOME, for example. After installing the system dependencies required, run the following to bootstrap the env:

source env.sh && chr_bootstrap

This will run some sanity checks, download depot_tools, configure right python interpreter (if needed) and set some env variables, needed for the next steps.

From now on, we assume you're in a shell with env.sh sourced.

Syncing the source files

Fetching chromium sources at <path/to/this/repo>/src.

gclient sync

Distributed builds with Goma

Nowadays, Goma is used for running distributed builds of Chromium. It relies on Google's cloud-based build cluster infrastructure to provide a distributed cache mechanism and massively parallelize the compilation process, dramatically reducing build times (e.g: clean builds < 30min).

Unfortunately, for now, it's not publicly available, rather is limited to early access users :(

By default, goma is enabled in Chromium builds configured using chr_* helper scritps, which should work out-of-the-box. To disable it, pass in --no-goma to chr_set_config/chr_config.

Distributed builds with Icecc

After install and configure icecc in you host system, export the following variables (in your bashrc, for example):

This step is necessary because icecc install dir, paths, etc differ in linux distros. The default versions in env.sh are meant to work in Arch Linux (with icecream AUR package installed).

export ICECC_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/lib/icecc
export ICECC_CREATEENV="$ICECC_INSTALL_DIR/bin

Then generate the icecc bundle for current source repo:

chr_icecc_setup -u

This will output a <path/to/this/repo>/icecc/icecc_clang.tgz file, add icecc bin paths to system $PATH var and export some necessary env variables, such as:

icecc support was implemented based on previous work done by Gyoyoung Kim's work described here

Configuring (generating build.ninja file)_

As these scripts have been written with Igalia's Ozone/Wayland development in mind, they assume you might need to maintain downstream and upstream builds in separate locations, so that they can be maintained simultaneosly, saving some time when switching over them.

So, supposing you're working on upstream features (eg: origin/main) and wants to build chrome with Ozone backends enabled, run:

chr_config --variant=ozone --type=release

This will generate build directory at <path/to/this/repo>/src/out/release/ozone.

Building

To build chrome or pass additional paramaters (e.g: number of jobs, etc), run:

chr_build -j200 chrome

Running chrome

Simple like that:

chr_run

Additional parameter are supported, for example:

chr_run --user-data-dir=/tmp/x --in-process-gpu

Focus/Scope

Conceived and mainly intended to be used for Igalia's Ozone/Wayland/X11 development workflow. Even though it should be useful for general chromium devel, some features such as bash/zsh completion support only ozone/wayland/linux specific bits.