These instructions explain how Linux users set up their Cobalt development environment, fetch a copy of the Cobalt code repository, and build a Cobalt binary. Note that the binary has a graphical client and must be run locally on the machine that you are using to view the client. For example, you cannot SSH into another machine and run the binary on that machine.
Choose where you want to put the depot_tools
directory, which is used by the Cobalt code. An easy option is to put them in ~/depot_tools
. Clone the tools by running the following command:
$ cd ~/ $ git clone https://cobalt.googlesource.com/depot_tools
Add your depot_tools
directory to the end of your PATH
variable. We recommend adding something like this to your .bashrc
or .profile
file:
$ PATH=${PATH}:/path/to/depot_tools
Run the following command to install packages needed to build and run Cobalt on Linux:
$ sudo apt-get install bison build-essential coreutils git gperf \ libaom-dev libasound2-dev libavformat-dev libavresample-dev \ libdirectfb-dev libdirectfb-extra libpulse-dev \ libgl1-mesa-dev libgles2-mesa-dev libvpx-dev libx11-dev \ libxcomposite-dev libxcomposite1 libxrender-dev libxrender1 \ libxpm-dev m4 python ruby tar xserver-xephyr xz-utils yasm
Install the latest version of the standard C++ header files (libstdc++
). For example:
sudo apt-get install libstdc++-4.8-dev
Clone the Cobalt code repository. The following git
command creates a cobalt
directory that contains the repository:
$ git clone https://cobalt.googlesource.com/cobalt
Modify your path to include the version of Clang that is downloaded in the next step of the instructions. The next step will return an error if this version of Clang is not in your path before it runs.
$PATH="/path/to/cobalt/src/third_party/llvm-build/Release+Asserts/bin:${PATH}"
Build the code by navigating to the src
directory in your new cobalt
directory and running the following command. You must specify a platform when running this command. On Ubuntu Linux, the canonical platform is linux-x64x11
.
You can also use the -C
command-line flag to specify a build_type
. Valid build types are debug
, devel
, qa
, and gold
. If you specify a build type, the command finishes sooner. Otherwise, all types are built.
$ cobalt/build/gyp_cobalt [-C <build_type>] <platform>
Compile the code from the src/
directory:
$ ninja -C out/<platform>_<build_type> <target_name>
The previous command contains three variables:
<platform>
is the platform configuration that identifies the platform. As described in the Starboard porting guide, it contains a family name
(like linux
) and a binary variant
(like x64x11
), separated by a hyphen.<build_type>
is the build you are compiling. Possible values are debug
, devel
, qa
, and gold
. These values are also described in the Starboard porting guide under the required file modifications for the gyp_configuration.gypi
file.<target_name>
is the name assigned to the compiled code and it is used to run the code compiled in this step. The most common names are cobalt
, nplb
, and all
:cobalt
builds the Cobalt app.nplb
builds Starboard‘s platform verification test suite to ensure that your platform’s code passes all tests for running Cobalt.all
builds all targets.For example:
ninja -C out/linux-x64x11_debug cobalt
This command compiles the Cobalt debug
configuration for the linux-x64x11
platform and creates a target named cobalt
that you can then use to run the compiled code.
Run the compiled code to launch the Cobalt client:
# Note that 'cobalt' was the <target_name> from the previous step. $ out/linux-x64x11_debug/cobalt [--url=<url>]
The flags in the following table are frequently used, and the full set of flags that this command supports are in cobalt/browser/switches.cc.