anticrisis / docker-chromium-builder

Docker configuration to build linux chromium

About this fork

I wanted to build a headless version of Chromium for linux and found the upstream Docker image. Unfortunately, it didn't work right out of the box, but was easy enough to correct.

This fork also adds the docker-headless-shell project to the build image.

After loading this image into a container, I was able to fetch the Chromium source tree according to these instructions. Quick summary:

First time, build the docker image:

$ docker build -t anticrisis/build-chromium .

Start the docker image (example uses Windows path to shared volume):

$ docker run -it -v d:\share:/media anticrisis/build-chromium

Fetch Chromium source and run platform-dependent hooks:

# mkdir -p /media/src/chromium && cd /media/src/chromium
# fetch --nohooks chromium

Take a nap here, because this is very slow.

This next step runs all an extra set of platform-specific build dependencies:

# cd /media/src/chromium/src
# gclient runhooks

Note that all commands using chromium tools should be run from the src folder.

The key thing about these preceeding steps is that the fetch, gclient and gn tools are platform-dependent. So you want to run them from the build image, not your host platform (Windows in my case).

Run this script to update your source tree, generate a build system, and start the build:

# /docker-headless-shell/build-headless-shell.sh 

While build-headless-shell.sh is a handy script for its purpose, there are some aspects that might not be that great in the general case.

For example, I found the need to tweak the script to set UPDATE=0 in order to avoid a very time-consuming source tree update each time I ran it.

The script also uses a .last file in its source directory, which will get wiped out when you reset your docker image.

I also manually tweaked the gn arguments a bit to get it to build, because "jumbo build" was taking forever and I was afraid it might run out of memory eventually.

# <edit out/headless-shell/args.gn to set use_jumbo_build=false>

Regenerate build system using new args.gn settings:

# gn gen out/headless-shell

The following is the upstream README:

---

About chromium-builder

The chromium-builder project provides a Docker image, chromedp/chromium-builder, suitable for use as an environment for building the Chromium source tree.

This was created in order to automate builds/deployments of Chromium's headless_shell for use with the Docker chromedp/headless-shell image.

Note: you will need to have the Chromium source tree already on disk.

Running

You can use this Docker image in the usual way:

# updated to latest version of chromium-builder
$ docker pull chromedp/chromium-builder

# build latest chrome version
$ docker run -it -v /path/to/chromium:/chromium -v /path/to/build:/build --rm chromedp/chromium-builder /build/build.sh

For example, if you have the Chromium source tree checked out to /media/src/chromium, and have the headless-shell Docker source checked out to ~/src/docker/headless-shell, you can build the latest headless-shell using the build-headless-shell.sh script via the following:

$ docker run -it \
    -v /media/src/chromium:/chromium \
    -v ~/src/docker/headless-shell:/build \
    --rm \
    chromedp/chromium-builder \
    /build/build-headless-shell.sh /

Building Image

The Docker image can be manually built the usual way:

# clone the repository
$ cd ~/src/ && git clone https://github.com/chromedp/docker-chromium-builder.git chromium-builder

# docker build
$ cd ~/src/chromium-builder && docker build -t chromedp/chromium-builder .