Follow the guidelines below for building Electron on Linux.
python -V
.On Ubuntu, install the following libraries:
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential clang libdbus-1-dev libgtk2.0-dev \
libnotify-dev libgnome-keyring-dev libgconf2-dev \
libasound2-dev libcap-dev libcups2-dev libxtst-dev \
libxss1 libnss3-dev gcc-multilib g++-multilib curl \
gperf bison
On RHEL / CentOS, install the following libraries:
$ sudo yum install clang dbus-devel gtk2-devel libnotify-devel \
libgnome-keyring-devel xorg-x11-server-utils libcap-devel \
cups-devel libXtst-devel alsa-lib-devel libXrandr-devel \
GConf2-devel nss-devel
On Fedora, install the following libraries:
$ sudo dnf install clang dbus-devel gtk2-devel libnotify-devel \
libgnome-keyring-devel xorg-x11-server-utils libcap-devel \
cups-devel libXtst-devel alsa-lib-devel libXrandr-devel \
GConf2-devel nss-devel
Other distributions may offer similar packages for installation via package managers such as pacman. Or one can compile from source code.
$ git clone https://github.com/electron/electron
The bootstrap script will download all necessary build dependencies and create the build project files. You must have Python 2.7.x for the script to succeed. Downloading certain files can take a long time. Notice that we are using ninja
to build Electron so there is no Makefile
generated.
$ cd electron
$ ./script/bootstrap.py --verbose
If you want to build for an arm
target you should also install the following dependencies:
$ sudo apt-get install libc6-dev-armhf-cross linux-libc-dev-armhf-cross \
g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf
And to cross-compile for arm
or ia32
targets, you should pass the --target_arch
parameter to the bootstrap.py
script:
$ ./script/bootstrap.py -v --target_arch=arm
If you would like to build both Release
and Debug
targets:
$ ./script/build.py
This script will cause a very large Electron executable to be placed in the directory out/R
. The file size is in excess of 1.3 gigabytes. This happens because the Release target binary contains debugging symbols. To reduce the file size, run the create-dist.py
script:
$ ./script/create-dist.py
This will put a working distribution with much smaller file sizes in the dist
directory. After running the create-dist.py
script, you may want to remove the 1.3+ gigabyte binary which is still in out/R
.
You can also build the Debug
target only:
$ ./script/build.py -c D
After building is done, you can find the electron
debug binary under out/D
.
To clean the build files:
$ npm run clean
To clean only out
and dist
directories:
$ npm run clean-build
Note: Both clean commands require running bootstrap
again before building.
Prebuilt clang
will try to link to libtinfo.so.5
. Depending on the host architecture, symlink to appropriate libncurses
:
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libncurses.so.5 /usr/lib/libtinfo.so.5
See Build System Overview: Tests
The default building configuration is targeted for major desktop Linux distributions. To build for a specific distribution or device, the following information may help you.
libchromiumcontent
locallyTo avoid using the prebuilt binaries of libchromiumcontent
, you can build libchromiumcontent
locally. To do so, follow these steps:
$ git submodule update --init --recursive
$ cp vendor/libchromiumcontent/.gclient .
--build_libchromiumcontent
switch to bootstrap.py
script:$ ./script/bootstrap.py -v --build_libchromiumcontent
Note that by default the shared_library
configuration is not built, so you can only build Release
version of Electron if you use this mode:
$ ./script/build.py -c R
clang
instead of downloaded clang
binariesBy default Electron is built with prebuilt clang
binaries provided by the Chromium project. If for some reason you want to build with the clang
installed in your system, you can call bootstrap.py
with --clang_dir=<path>
switch. By passing it the build script will assume the clang
binaries reside in <path>/bin/
.
For example if you installed clang
under /user/local/bin/clang
:
$ ./script/bootstrap.py -v --build_libchromiumcontent --clang_dir /usr/local
$ ./script/build.py -c R
clang
To build Electron with compilers like g++
, you first need to disable clang
with --disable_clang
switch first, and then set CC
and CXX
environment variables to the ones you want.
For example building with GCC toolchain:
$ env CC=gcc CXX=g++ ./script/bootstrap.py -v --build_libchromiumcontent --disable_clang
$ ./script/build.py -c R
Apart from CC
and CXX
, you can also set following environment variables to custom the building configurations:
CPPFLAGS
CPPFLAGS_host
CFLAGS
CFLAGS_host
CXXFLAGS
CXXFLAGS_host
AR
AR_host
CC
CC_host
CXX
CXX_host
LDFLAGS
The environment variables have to be set when executing the bootstrap.py
script, it won’t work in the build.py
script.