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 the latest code seems more stable (?) and provides more features.

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

Installing 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 is better to download a tarball 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 (this takes a long time because of the 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 the Chromium debug build:

$ cd ~/chromium/src/xcodebuild/Debug
$ open ./Chromium.app

Run the Chromium release build:

$ cd ~/chromium/src/xcodebuild/Release
$ open ./Chromium.app

The latest revision of Chromium looks cool.