Building Chromium browser on your Mac

Posted on Aug 7, 2010

Building your own browser is the best way to find bugs and fix them. Now, I’d like to introduce how to build Chromium on your mac. I think that the latest code seems more stable(?) and provides more features.

This is a starting point to build Chromium on Mac OS X.
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/MacBuildInstructions

Installing the depot-tools

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/install-gclient

$ svn co http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/tools/depot_tools

Add depot_tools to your PATH:
$ export PATH=`pwd`/depot_tools:"$PATH"

Getting the code

A checkout straight from the Subversion (SVN) repository can take a long time. It would be good to download a tar ball from http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/archives/chromium_tarball.html

Then, you can update the code to the latest revision from the SVN repository.
$ gclient sync

Building from the command line

To build all targets (it takes a long time due to test case builds)
$ cd ~/chromium/src/build
$ xcodebuild -project all.xcodeproj -configuration Debug -target All

To build just chrome:
$ cd ~/chromium/src/chrome
$ xcodebuild -project chrome.xcodeproj -configuration Debug -target chrome

Running Chromium

Run Chromium debug build
$ cd ~/chromium/src/xcodebuild/Debug

$ open ./Chromium.app

Run Chromium release build

$ cd ~/chromium/src/xcodebuild/Release

$ open ./Chromium.app

The latest revision of Chromium looks cool.