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This Wiki page describes how to build CEF on Debian 7 systems.

Note to Editors: Changes made to this Wiki page without prior approval via the CEF Forum or Issue Tracker may be lost or reverted.

Note: Developing Chromium/CEF on Debian 7 is not recommended. Chromium stopped supporting Debian 7 in March 2017. These instructions should be considered valid only for branch 3029 and older.

CEF/Chromium is primarily developed on Ubuntu 14 LTS systems as described on the BranchesAndBuilding Wiki page. To build CEF/Chromium on a Debian 7 system additional manual steps are required.

The below instructions are based on the CEF 2526 branch built on a Debian 7.8.0 64-bit Linux system. To build using this system:

1. Install Debian 7 64-bit. This can be done using dedicated hardware or a VMware, Parallels or VirtualBox virtual machine. At least 6GB of RAM and 40GB of disk space are required to successfully build Chromium/CEF and create a CEF binary distribution.

2. Download the install-build-deps.sh script.

# Download the install-build-deps.sh script at the correct revision (initially base64 encoded).
wget -O install-build-deps.txt https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/fedbbb0aa762826ba2fc85a2b934dc9660639aa7/build/install-build-deps.sh?format=TEXT
# Decode the script.
python -m base64 -d install-build-deps.txt > install-build-deps.sh
# Mark the script as executable.
chmod 755 install-build-deps.sh

3. Edit the install-build-deps.sh script so that it will run on Debian 7. This includes removing Ubuntu-specific logic and packages that are not available on Debian 7. For example:

--- install-build-deps.sh   2015-03-11 16:42:28.546982015 -0400
+++ install-build-deps.sh   2015-03-11 16:43:40.930979602 -0400
@@ -72,12 +72,6 @@
 lsb_release=$(lsb_release --codename --short)
 ubuntu_codenames="(precise|quantal|raring|saucy|trusty)"
 if [ 0 -eq "${do_unsupported-0}" ] && [ 0 -eq "${do_quick_check-0}" ] ; then
-  if [[ ! $lsb_release =~ $ubuntu_codenames ]]; then
-    echo "ERROR: Only Ubuntu 12.04 (precise) through 14.04 (trusty) are"\
-        "currently supported" >&2
-    exit 1
-  fi
-
   if ! uname -m | egrep -q "i686|x86_64"; then
     echo "Only x86 architectures are currently supported" >&2
     exit
@@ -91,12 +85,11 @@
 fi

 # Packages needed for chromeos only
-chromeos_dev_list="libbluetooth-dev libxkbcommon-dev"
+chromeos_dev_list=""

 # Packages needed for development
 dev_list="apache2.2-bin bison cdbs curl dpkg-dev elfutils devscripts fakeroot
-          flex fonts-thai-tlwg g++ git-core git-svn gperf language-pack-da
-          language-pack-fr language-pack-he language-pack-zh-hant
+          flex fonts-thai-tlwg g++ git-core git-svn gperf
           libapache2-mod-php5 libasound2-dev libbrlapi-dev libav-tools
           libbz2-dev libcairo2-dev libcap-dev libcups2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev
           libdrm-dev libelf-dev libexif-dev libgconf2-dev libgl1-mesa-dev
@@ -170,11 +163,6 @@
 nacl_list="${nacl_list} libgl1-mesa-glx${mesa_variant}:i386"

 # Some package names have changed over time
-if package_exists ttf-mscorefonts-installer; then
-  dev_list="${dev_list} ttf-mscorefonts-installer"
-else
-  dev_list="${dev_list} msttcorefonts"
-fi
 if package_exists libnspr4-dbg; then
   dbg_list="${dbg_list} libnspr4-dbg libnss3-dbg"
   lib_list="${lib_list} libnspr4 libnss3"

4. Install the necessary packages (run as root).

# Run the script excluding unnecessary components.
./install-build-deps.sh --no-lib32 --no-arm --no-chromeos-fonts --no-nacl

# Install additional packages that will be required later on.
# cmake is required when building llvm/clang.
# libgtkglext1-dev is required when building the cefclient sample application.
apt-get install cmake libgtkglext1-dev

5. Download Chromium and CEF source code at the correct branch and without building (see the BranchesAndBuilding Wiki page for complete CEF build instructions).

python automate-git.py --download-dir=/path/to/chromium_git --depot-tools-dir=/path/to/depot_tools --no-distrib --no-build --branch=2526

6. Add depot_tools to the PATH.

export PATH=/path/to/depot_tools:$PATH

7. Build cmake version 2.8.12.2 or newer (required by newer llvm/clang builds).

# Download/build in whichever directory you prefer.
cd ~

wget http://www.cmake.org/files/v2.8/cmake-2.8.12.2.tar.gz
tar xzf cmake-2.8.12.2.tar.gz
cd cmake-2.8.12.2
./configure
./make

# Run the following command as root.
./make install

Verify that the cmake version is now correct by running cmake --version.

8. Build llvm and clang locally. Debian 7 ships with an older version of GLIBC than Ubuntu 14 so the binaries distributed with the Chromium checkout cannot be used. See comments in the update.sh script for additional llvm/clang build information.

cd /path/to/chromium_git/chromium/src
./tools/clang/scripts/update.sh --force-local-build --without-android --gcc-toolchain '/usr'

If you get build errors while compiling llvm/clang for 2526 branch or newer see this thread for possible solutions.

9. Build binutils locally for 2526 branch or newer. The binutils binaries included with these newer branches have the same GLIBC issue as llvm/clang.

A. Edit the “src/third_party/binutils/build-one.sh” script and change all instances of “/build/output” to “$PWD/build/output”. This script is intended to build inside a chroot environment but we want to build directly on the Debian system instead.

B. Download and build binutils (based on the contents of “src/third_party/binutils/build-all.sh”):

cd /path/to/chromium_git/chromium/src/third_party/binutils

# Download binutils at the version specified in build-all.sh.
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.25.tar.bz2
tar xjf binutils-2.25.tar.bz2

cd binutils-2.25

# Apply the Chromium patches specified in build-all.sh.
patch -p1 < ../unlock-thin.patch
patch -p1 < ../plugin-dso-fix.patch

cd ..

# Build binutils (don’t forget to apply the build-one.sh changes from A first!).
./build-one.sh binutils-2.25

# Copy the resulting files to the expected location (backing up the old files first).
mv Linux_x64/Release Linux_x64/Release_old
cp -a binutils-2.25/build/output/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu Linux_x64/Release
mkdir Linux_x64/Release/include/
cp -a binutils-2.25/build/output/include/plugin-api.h Linux_x64/Release/include/

Verify that the resulting executables are correct by running Linux_x64/Release/bin/objcopy.

10. Build Chromium/CEF and create the CEF binary distribution.

python automate-git.py --download-dir=/path/to/chromium_git --depot-tools-dir=/path/to/depot_tools --no-update --force-build --force-distrib --branch=2526