fpCEF3
Chromium Embedded Framework for Free Pascal
How to get started
Install cef3.lpk into Lazarus
Windows
Download CEF3 from here or here and copy all files from either Debug or Release to the folder your .exe is / will be in.
Linux
You need a build of CEF3 with tcmalloc disabled. The official downloads provided won't work!
Copy / link libcef.so,
a) to a default library location, eg. /usr/lib(64), /usr/local/lib(64) or
b) somewhere and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH accordingly
Make sure to include cthreads as the first unit in your main program.
General notes
Apart from the files in the Debug or Release folder, CEF needs the files / folders from the Resources folder. Unless you set CefResourcesDirPath and CefLocalesDirPath, CEF expects them to be in the folder your executable is in.
However in any case icudtl.dat must be in the same folder as the CEF library!
Hints
Don't use --single-process and don't change CefSingleProcess to True.
This will trigger a SIGSEGV in pthread_mutex_lock, which is a bug in either CEF3 or Chromium itself: You can find more details here.
If the browser goes "blank" (e.g. when loading a page), the render process crashed.
Most of the time it seems to be related to JavaScript/V8, see Debugging on how to debug the render process.
Please note, that the render process will be automatically restarted on the next page request.
SubProcess
When initialising CEF for the first time (mostly in your main app) a subprocess is started. By default a second instance of the main program is used as the subprocess. The preferred way however is to define an own (minimal) subprocess executable.
You can achieve this in fpCEF3 by setting CefBrowserSubprocessPath to the path of your subprocess executable.
In the LCLSimple example this can be done by changing TMainform.FormCreate at the end of main.pas.
A minimal subprocess can be found in /Examples/SubProcess. Note, that the subprocess also needs the CEF3 library and resources in its path, so the easiest way is to put the subprocess executable in the same folder as the main exe.
More details here
Debugging
Sometimes it is useful to debug the subprocesses spawned by cef. On Linux this can be done by adding
--renderer-cmd-prefix='xterm -title renderer -e gdb --args'to the command line.
Further details can be found here.
FAQ:
Which versions of CEF are supported?
fpCEF3 only supports CEF3, no support for CEF1.
See changelog for the latest supported version, older ones usually don't work, newer ones may work, but are not recommended.
Which platforms are supported?
- Windows
- Linux with GTK2 or QT
The plain header is ready for Mac, but the component needs to be adopted.
Is there a documentation for fpCEF?
No, but you can find information in
- cef3lib.pas / cef3api.pas
- the sample programs (admittedly very basic ones)
- the official api docs here
- the official cefclient example program here
If you feel like contributing some more Pascal examples - please do.
Can I help?
Of course - patches are always welcome :)
Can you help?
To a certain amount - yes.