Brave Browser

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.

Build prerequisites

All platforms

1. nodejs >= 6.1

   Install from your package manager or download from https://nodejs.org

2. node-gyp 3.3.1

    sudo npm install -g node-gyp@3.3.1
   

Windows

Ensure you have the following installed:

• Node.js 6.1+
• Python 2.7
• Visual Studio 2013 or 2015

Linux

• apt-get install libgnome-keyring-dev build-essential

Installation

After installing the prerequisites:

1. 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
   

2. Open the working directory:

    cd browser-laptop
   

3. 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.

Development

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.

Port

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.

Debugging

See docs/debugging.md for information on debugging.

Running inside of a development version of Brave's Electron fork

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:

• OSX build instructions
• Windows build instructions
• Linux build instructions

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for contribution guidelines.

Packaging for bundles, installers, and updates

In order do run any build commands, you'll need an environment variable set for CHANNEL (set to 'dev', 'beta', or 'stable').

OSX:

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.

Windows 7,8,10 x64:

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

Linux:

To create a package:

npm run build-package

To create a dev package:

CHANNEL=dev npm run build-package