Note: it is not 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? See go/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 the depot_tools repository:
$ git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git
Add depot_tools to the end of your PATH (you will probably want to put this in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc). Assuming you cloned depot_tools to /path/to/depot_tools:
$ export PATH="$PATH:/path/to/depot_tools"
Create a chromium 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 the fetch 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 to fetch.
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 and fetch will automatically execute gclient runhooks at the end.
When fetch completes, it will have created a hidden .gclient file and a directory called src in the working directory. The remaining instructions assume you have switched to the src directory:
$ cd src
Once you have checked out the code, and assuming you're using Ubuntu, run build/install-build-deps.sh
You may need to adjust the build dependencies for other distros. There are some notes at the end of this document, but we make no guarantees for their accuracy.
Once you've run install-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 runhooks
Optional: You can also install 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 uses Ninja as its main build tool along with a tool called GN to generate .ninja files. You can create any number of build directories with different configurations. To create a build directory, run:
$ gn gen out/Default --args='enable_cast_receiver=true is_castos=true'
Default with another name, but it should be a subdirectory of out.gn help on the command line or read the quick start guide.You might try some of the suggestions on the Linux build setup.
Build cast_shell with Ninja using the command:
$ autoninja -C out/Default cast_shell
(autoninja is a wrapper that automatically provides optimal values for the arguments passed to ninja.)
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 branch origin/main). If you don't want to use this script, you can also just use git 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.