Note: it isnot possible to build a binary functionally equivalent to a Chromecast. This is to build a single-page content embedder with similar functionality to Cast products.
Are you a Google employee? Seego/building-linux-cast instead.
Most development is done on Ubuntu (currently 14.04, Trusty Tahr). There are some instructions for other distros below, but they are mostly unsupported.
depot_toolsClone thedepot_tools repository:
$ git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git
Adddepot_tools to the end of your PATH (you will probably want to put this in your~/.bashrc or~/.zshrc). Assuming you cloneddepot_tools to/path/to/depot_tools:
$export PATH="$PATH:/path/to/depot_tools"
Create achromium directory for the checkout and change to it (you can call this whatever you like and put it wherever you like, as long as the full path has no spaces):
$ mkdir~/chromium && cd ~/chromium
Run thefetch tool from depot_tools to check out the code and its dependencies.
$ fetch--nohooks chromium
If you don't want the full repo history, you can save a lot of time by adding the--no-history flag tofetch.
Expect the command to take 30 minutes on even a fast connection, and many hours on slower ones.
If you've already installed the build dependencies on the machine (from another checkout, for example), you can omit the--nohooks flag andfetch will automatically executegclient runhooks at the end.
Whenfetch completes, it will have created a hidden.gclient file and a directory calledsrc in the working directory. The remaining instructions assume you have switched to thesrc directory:
$ cd srcOnce you have checked out the code, and assuming you're using Ubuntu, runbuild/install-build-deps.sh
You may need to adjust the build dependencies for other distros. There are somenotes at the end of this document, but we make no guarantees for their accuracy.
Once you've runinstall-build-deps at least once, you can now run the Chromium-specific hooks, which will download additional binaries and other things you might need:
$ gclient runhooksOptional: You can alsoinstall API keys if you want your build to talk to some Google services, but this is not necessary for most development and testing purposes.
Chromium usesNinja as its main build tool along with a tool calledGN to generate.ninja files. You can create any number ofbuild directories with different configurations. To create a build directory, run:
$ gn genout/Default--args='enable_cast_receiver=true is_castos=true'
Default with another name, but it should be a subdirectory ofout.gn help on the command line or read thequick start guide.You might try some of the suggestions on theLinux build setup.
Build cast_shell with Ninja using the command:
$ autoninja-Cout/Default cast_shell
(autoninja is a wrapper that automatically provides optimal values for the arguments passed toninja.)
Once it is built, you can simply run it:
$out/Default/cast_shell--ozone-platform=x11 http://google.com
To update an existing checkout, you can run
$ git rebase-update$ gclient sync
The first command updates the primary Chromium source repository and rebases any of your local branches on top of tip-of-tree (aka the Git branchorigin/main). If you don't want to use this script, you can also just usegit pull or other common Git commands to update the repo.
The second command syncs dependencies to the appropriate versions and re-runs hooks as needed.