Building Cef from source

Requirements :

• Depot Tools
• Visual Studio 2013 Community or Professional Update 4
• Windows 8.1 SDK
• Lots of Drive Space and Memory!
• and last but not least a lot of time on your hands

Once Depot Tools is installed, you should be ready to run the Git Automated Workflow.

The downloading/building of cef is very much automated but generating the vs 2013 project files is a manual process.

1. To begin the process of downloading and building cef, create a directory on a drive of your computer ( c:\cefsource for example in these instructions), download the automate.git.py python script and save it to c:\cefsource
2. Open a dos command prompt ( run as administrator ) and go to the cefsource directory

cd c:\cefsource
# SET some GYP environment variables by typing
set GYP_GENERATORS=ninja,msvs-ninja
set GYP_MSVS_VERSION=2013

You are now ready to run the cef automated git workflow

At your command prompt, type ( note that python was automatically installed when you installed Depot Tools ) :

python automate-git.py --download-dir=/source

this will run the automate-git.py script and start downloading the sources needed to build cef into a source folder of your c:\cefsource folder. The version of cef that will be downloaded is the Dev Channel (trunk)

If you need to download a different branch of cef, use :

python automate-git.py --download-dir=/source --branch=branch_number_here

example

python automate-git.py --download-dir=/source --branch=2272

will download and build the cef branch # 2272

Note that this script will also download the corresponding version of chromium which is needed to rebuild cef from source.

This script will run for a long time ( hours ) and when it is done you will find the chromium and cef sources in your c:\cefsource folder, binary distributions of cef in C:\cefsource\chromium\src\cef\binary_distrib

You can patch cef if you would like, by dropping patches in the C:\cefsource\chromium\src\cef\patch\patches and editing C:\cefsource\chromium\src\cef\patch\patch.cfg

#####To generate Visual Studio 2013 project files

# at your dos command prompt type
cd C:\cefsource\chromium\src\cef

and run the cef_create_projects.bat batch file ( by typing cef_create_projects.bat and pressing Enter)

when that batch file has finished running, you will find the Visual Studio 2013 solution cef.sln under C:\cefsource\chromium\src\cef and all of the cef visual studio project files.