Build Instructions (Windows)

    • Windows 10 / Server 2012 R2 or higher
    • Git
    • Debugging Tools for Windows of Windows SDK 10.0.15063.468 if you plan on creating a full distribution since is used for creating a symbol store from .pdb files.
      • The SDK Debugging Tools must also be installed. If the Windows 10 SDK was installed via the Visual Studio installer, then they can be installed by going to: Control Panel → Programs → Programs and Features → Select the “Windows Software Development Kit” → Change → → Check “Debugging Tools For Windows” → Change. Or, you can download the standalone SDK installer and use it to install the Debugging Tools.

    If you don’t currently have a Windows installation, has timebombed versions of Windows that you can use to build Electron.

    Building Electron is done entirely with command-line scripts and cannot be done with Visual Studio. You can develop Electron with any editor but support for building with Visual Studio will come in the future.

    Note: Even though Visual Studio is not used for building, it’s still required because we need the build toolchains it provides.

    Exclude source tree from Windows Security

    Windows Security doesn’t like one of the files in the Chromium source code (see ), so it will constantly delete it, causing gclient sync issues. You can exclude the source tree from being monitored by Windows Security by following these instructions.

    32bit Build

    To build for the 32bit target, you need to pass target_cpu = "x86" as a GN arg. You can build the 32bit target alongside the 64bit target by using a different output directory for GN, e.g. out/Release-x86, with different arguments.

    The other building steps are exactly the same.

    To generate a Visual Studio project, you can pass the --ide=vs2017 parameter to gn gen:

    Troubleshooting

    If you encountered an error like Command xxxx not found, you may try to use the console to execute the build scripts.

    Fatal internal compiler error: C1001

    Try reinstalling 32bit Node.js.

    Error: ENOENT, stat ‘C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\npm’

    Creating that directory :

    You may get this error if you are using Git Bash for building, you should use PowerShell or VS2015 Command Prompt instead.

    cannot create directory at ‘…’: Filename too long

    node.js has some extremely long pathnames, and by default git on windows doesn’t handle long pathnames correctly (even though windows supports them). This should fix it:

    Build Scripts Hang Until Keypress

    This bug is a “feature” of Windows’ command prompt. It happens when clicking inside the prompt window with QuickEdit enabled and is intended to allow selecting and copying output text easily. Since each accidental click will pause the build process, you might want to disable this feature in the command prompt properties.