Desktop browser for macOS, Windows and Linux. To download the latest release, go to https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/releases. To build Brave from source code, see below.
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nodejs>= 6.1Install from your package manager or download from https://nodejs.org
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node-gyp3.3.1sudo npm install -g node-gyp@3.3.1
Ensure you have the following installed:
apt-get install libgnome-keyring-dev build-essential
After installing the prerequisites:
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Clone the git repository from GitHub:
# For beta testers: git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop # For devs over HTTPS: git clone https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop # For devs over SSH: git clone git@github.com:brave/browser-laptop.git -
Open the working directory:
cd browser-laptop -
Install the Node (v5+) dependencies:
npm install
If this fails on Linux with an error related to abp-filter-parser-cpp, try updating to Node 6.1 and node-gyp 3.3.1 (see discussion at brave#214)
Additional notes on troubleshooting installation issues are in the Troubleshooting page in the Wiki.
Some platforms are available as pre-configured VMs. See the readme for details.
To start the server and file watchers run the following on the command line:
npm run watch
To run the browser:
npm start
To run the tests:
npm run watch-test or npm run watch-all
npm test
You will also have to have two terminal tabs up to run Brave. One for Brave to watch changes, and one to run Brave.
Some errors related to brave/electron update can be fixed by doing a clean install:
rm -rf node_modules/
npm install
If this does not work, please clear out your ~/.electron first and try again.
Brave uses port 8080 to communicate between its client and server sides by default. If you are using port 8080 for something else (e.g. a web proxy) then you can set the node config to make it use a different one.
e.g. npm config set brave:port 9001
Additional notes on troubleshooting development issues are in the Troubleshooting page in the Wiki.
See docs/debugging.md for information on debugging.
We are using a fork of Electron with some minor modifications here: https://github.com/brave/electron
Most of the time you will not need to use that repository, we provide pre-built binaries when you npm install with our own fork of electron-prebuilt.
If you want to add code to Electron itself, then you may want to build it. An example would be exposing a new event to the webview from Electron. We try to upstream everything to atom/electron but we can take things in our fork early before upstreaming.
Build instructions:
See CONTRIBUTING.md for contribution guidelines.
In order do run any build commands, you'll need an environment variable set for CHANNEL (set to 'dev', 'beta', or 'stable').
From within brave-browser you can create a .app file for distribution:
npm run build-package
After the .app file is built you can create a dmg and update zip with:
IDENTIFIER=XYZ npm run build-installer
Where XYZ is your signing identifier.
You'll also need to set the CERT and CERT_PASSWORD environment variables with your authenticode signing cert and password if you want to build an installer.
To set these values, you can either set the environment on a per-session basis ($env:CHANNEL="dev") or update your system/user environment variables.
To create a folder with the app .exe and all dependencies you can run:
npm run build-package
After the above folder is created, you can create a setup (exe, msi, RELEASES file and update nupkg) with:
npm run build-installer
To create a package:
npm run build-package
To create a dev package:
CHANNEL=dev npm run build-package