Follow the guidelines below for building Electron on Windows.
symstore.exe
is used for
creating a symbol store from .pdb
files.If you don't currently have a Windows installation, dev.microsoftedge.com has timebombed versions of Windows that you can use to build Electron.
Building Electron is done entirely with command-line scripts and cannot be done with Visual Studio. You can develop Electron with any editor but support for building with Visual Studio will come in the future.
Note: Even though Visual Studio is not used for building, it's still required because we need the build toolchains it provides.
$ git clone https://github.com/electron/electron.git
The bootstrap script will download all necessary build dependencies and create
the build project files. Notice that we're using ninja
to build Electron so
there is no Visual Studio project generated.
$ cd electron
$ python script\bootstrap.py -v
Build both Release and Debug targets:
$ python script\build.py
You can also only build the Debug target:
$ python script\build.py -c D
After building is done, you can find electron.exe
under out\D
(debug
target) or under out\R
(release target).
To build for the 32bit target, you need to pass --target_arch=ia32
when
running the bootstrap script:
$ python script\bootstrap.py -v --target_arch=ia32
The other building steps are exactly the same.
To generate a Visual Studio project, you can pass the --msvs
parameter:
$ python script\bootstrap.py --msvs
To clean the build files:
$ npm run clean
To clean only out
and dist
directories:
$ npm run clean-build
Note: Both clean commands require running bootstrap
again before building.
If you encountered an error like Command xxxx not found
, you may try to use
the VS2015 Command Prompt
console to execute the build scripts.
Make sure you have the latest Visual Studio update installed.
If building under Cygwin, you may see bootstrap.py
failed with following
error:
Assertion failed: ((handle))->activecnt >= 0, file src\win\pipe.c, line 1430
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "script/bootstrap.py", line 87, in <module>
sys.exit(main())
File "script/bootstrap.py", line 22, in main
update_node_modules('.')
File "script/bootstrap.py", line 56, in update_node_modules
execute([NPM, 'install'])
File "/home/zcbenz/codes/raven/script/lib/util.py", line 118, in execute
raise e
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['npm.cmd', 'install']' returned non-zero exit status 3
This is caused by a bug when using Cygwin Python and Win32 Node together. The
solution is to use the Win32 Python to execute the bootstrap script (assuming
you have installed Python under C:\Python27
):
$ /cygdrive/c/Python27/python.exe script/bootstrap.py
Try reinstalling 32bit Node.js.
Creating that directory should fix the problem:
$ mkdir ~\AppData\Roaming\npm
You may get this error if you are using Git Bash for building, you should use PowerShell or VS2015 Command Prompt instead.