Windows build instructions

Requirements

Just like Chromium itself, building Crosswalk for Windows requires Visual Studio and the Windows 10 SDK. Also similarly to Chromium, different Crosswalk releases only work with specific versions of Visual Studio and the Windows 10 SDK. The table below summarizes the requirements for each Crosswalk release that supports Windows.

Additionally, you must use at least Windows 7 to be able to build Crosswalk. 32-bit installations are not supported. Also make sure your system locale is set to English, otherwise you might run into error messages such as "The file contains a character that cannot be represented in the current code page".

These instructions assume you have already downloaded depot_tools, bootstrapped it (ie. git and Python have been installed) and it is in your PATH environment variable. See the prerequisites page for further information.

Environment setup

By default, when checking out Chromium as part of Crosswalk's check out process, the scripts will attempt to download Visual Studio from internal Google servers by default (this comes from Chromium).

The first thing you need to do then is to make sure this does not happen, as only Google employees are able to reach those servers. You need to install Visual Studio yourself.

When using cmd:

set DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0
setx DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN 0

The first command will set the environment variable for the existing prompt, while the second will set it for all future prompts.

See the prerequisites section if you prefer to configure those environment variables using a GUI.

Configure gyp

Older (< 23) Crosswalk versions are based on Chromium releases that use gyp as their meta-build system.

If you want to build one of those versions, make sure you follow the gyp setup in the section Crosswalk 22 and earlier: gyp setup at the end of this page if you would like to build for a different CPU architecture or adjust any build parameters.

Fetching the source code

1. Choose where you want to download and build Crosswalk. If you are using gyp and opted for having a chromium.gyp_env file, this directory must contain that file.

   cd C:\path\to\crosswalk-checkout

2. Generate a .gclient file. This tells gclient where to fetch Crosswalk from. It assumes depot_tools is in your PATH variable.

    gclient config --name src/xwalk https://github.com/crosswalk-project/crosswalk.git

3. Run gclient sync to fetch Crosswalk, all other git repositories it depends on as well as any additional helper files. If you are using Crosswalk 22 or earlier, this will also automatically run the gyp_xwalk script in the end.

    gclient sync

Crosswalk 23 and later: GN setup

Starting with Crosswalk 23, GN has replaced gyp as the meta-build system for both Chromium and Crosswalk. Its setup is a bit different compared to gyp, as chromium.gyp_env (and the GYP_DEFINES environment variable) does not have any effect, and the gyp_xwalk is not used.

Instead, you use the gn binary to both edit a file with your settings as well as generate the files required by Ninja to build.

In order to build Crosswalk, you need to have at least one line in your settings to pull some default variables we set:

cd C:\path\to\crosswalk-checkout\src
gn args out/Default

A text editor will be shown, where you must add the following line:

import("//xwalk/build/windows.gni")

You can add other settings after this statement, such as is_debug = false for a release build or target_cpu = "x64" to create a 64-bit build.

Once you have done this once, you can later call gn gen out/Default to just regenerate the ninja files based on your existing settings if you need to (most of the time, this will be done automatically for you when building).

See Chromium's page about GN for more information, including other common settings.

Crosswalk 22 and earlier: gyp setup

Up to Crosswalk 22, both Chromium and Crosswalk used gyp as a meta-build system that generated the actual build system files used by ninja.

gyp accepts flags to change its behavior. They can be used to tell it you want to create a 64-bit build, for example.

There are two ways to define those flags:

1. Create a file called chromium.gyp_env on the directory where you will later call gclient config and gclient sync (so the one above src/). It needs to look like this:

    {
      'GYP_DEFINES': 'key1=value1 key2=value2',
    }

2. Use set and/or setx in a command prompt to set GYP_DEFINES as an environment variable.

These values are read every time you run the src\xwalk\gyp_xwalk script, so whenever you want to change them remember to run the script afterwards.

To generate a 64-bit build instead of a 32-bit one, you can set target_arch to x64. For example, if you are using chromium.gyp_env, its contents should look like this:

{
  'GYP_DEFINES': 'target_arch=x64',
}

Do not forget to run src\xwalk\gyp_xwalk (it is run automatically with gclient sync) whenever you modify your gyp flags, otherwise your changes will have no effect.

Building Crosswalk

Once either gyp or GN has been properly configured, it is time to build Crosswalk.

cd C:\path\to\crosswalk-checkout\src
ninja -C YOUR-BUILD-DIR YOUR-TARGET

You should replace YOUR-BUILD-DIR above with the appropriate directory created with gyp or GN: With gyp and a 32-bit build, it's out/Release. With gyp and a 64-bit build, it's out/Release_x64. * With GN, it's whatever directory you chose, such as out/Default.

Special topics: Visual Studio integration

It is possible to use Visual Studio as an IDE when working on Chromium and Crosswalk with minimal changes.

gyp

If you are using gyp, you need to set the GYP_GENERATORS flag to ninja,msvs-ninja and call the gyp_xwalk script again.

To build in Visual Studio, open xwalk.sln from path\to\crosswalk-checkout\src\xwalk and you’re ready to go. Select a target and click Build (for example xwalk, or xwalk_builder). Please note that xwalk.sln actually has all the Chromium code as a dependency therefore xwalk.sln has something like 600 subprojects which requires a pretty powerful machine with a lot of RAM to be able to handle that correctly.

We suggest using the Funnel extension which allows you to select which subproject you want to load.

GN

If you are using gn, you need to pass --ide=vs to gn gen.

GN will produce a file called all.sln in your build directory. It will internally use Ninja to compile while still allowing most IDE functions to work. If you manually run gn gen again you will need to resupply this argument, but normally GN will keep the build and IDE files up to date automatically when you build.

The generated solution will contain several thousand projects and will be very slow to load. Use the --filters argument to restrict generating project files for only the code you're interested in, although this will also limit what files appear in the project explorer. A minimal solution that will let you compile and run Chrome in the IDE but will not show any source files is:

gn gen --ide=vs --filters=//xwalk out\Default

Chromium information

Most of the instructions described in this page are similar to Chromium's own instructions. We suggest you take a look at its instructions as well; it might help solve any questions you have after reading our documentation.

• Chromium Windows build instructions