Electron uses gyp for project generation and ninja for building. Project configurations can be found in the .gyp
and .gypi
files.
Following gyp
files contain the main rules for building Electron:
electron.gyp
defines how Electron itself is built.common.gypi
adjusts the build configurations of Node to make it build together with Chromium.brightray/brightray.gyp
defines how brightray
is built and includes the default configurations for linking with Chromium.brightray/brightray.gypi
includes general build configurations about building.Since Chromium is quite a large project, the final linking stage can take quite a few minutes, which makes it hard for development. In order to solve this, Chromium introduced the “component build”, which builds each component as a separate shared library, making linking very quick but sacrificing file size and performance.
In Electron we took a very similar approach: for Debug
builds, the binary will be linked to a shared library version of Chromium’s components to achieve fast linking time; for Release
builds, the binary will be linked to the static library versions, so we can have the best possible binary size and performance.
All of Chromium’s prebuilt binaries (libchromiumcontent
) are downloaded when running the bootstrap script. By default both static libraries and shared libraries will be downloaded and the final size should be between 800MB and 2GB depending on the platform.
By default, libchromiumcontent
is downloaded from Amazon Web Services. If the LIBCHROMIUMCONTENT_MIRROR
environment variable is set, the bootstrap script will download from it. libchromiumcontent-qiniu-mirror
is a mirror for libchromiumcontent
. If you have trouble in accessing AWS, you can switch the download address to it via export LIBCHROMIUMCONTENT_MIRROR=http://7xk3d2.dl1.z0.glb.clouddn.com/
If you only want to build Electron quickly for testing or development, you can download just the shared library versions by passing the --dev
parameter:
$ ./script/bootstrap.py --dev
$ ./script/build.py -c D
Electron links with different sets of libraries in Release
and Debug
builds. gyp
, however, doesn’t support configuring different link settings for different configurations.
To work around this Electron uses a gyp
variable libchromiumcontent_component
to control which link settings to use and only generates one target when running gyp
.
Unlike most projects that use Release
and Debug
as target names, Electron uses R
and D
instead. This is because gyp
randomly crashes if there is only one Release
or Debug
build configuration defined, and Electron only has to generate one target at a time as stated above.
This only affects developers, if you are just building Electron for rebranding you are not affected.
Test your changes conform to the project coding style using:
$ npm run lint
Test functionality using:
$ npm test
Whenever you make changes to Electron source code, you’ll need to re-run the build before the tests:
$ npm run build && npm test
You can make the test suite run faster by isolating the specific test or block you’re currently working on using Mocha’s exclusive tests feature. Just append .only
to any describe
or it
function call:
describe.only('some feature', function () {
// ... only tests in this block will be run
})
Alternatively, you can use mocha’s grep
option to only run tests matching the given regular expression pattern:
$ npm test -- --grep child_process
Tests that include native modules (e.g. runas
) can’t be executed with the debug build (see #2558 for details), but they will work with the release build.
To run the tests with the release build use:
$ npm test -- -R