Development Environment

Once you've acquired your development hardware, the next step is to ensure your development environment is capable of downloading and building the code. This includes ensuring runtime hardware needs, package management, and Git configuration.

Checking resource requirements

You may have 128GB of RAM and a 2TB harddrive, but if all of those resources are being consumed, you will have a hard time developing ChromiumOS.

Check for at least 64GB of free memory:

$ free -gh

The chromium and chromiumos repositories each require roughly 200GB of disk space including source files and build artifacts. Ideally you should aim for at least 500GB of free space on the mount which hosts your development directory:

$ df -BG

Update package management system

To make sure you have the most up-to-date packages installed (or a similar command if using a different package manager):

$ sudo apt update

Googlers only: If you receive the error Could not resolve 'external-repositories-are-not-allowed.google.com', follow these instructions. You may need to run sudo glinux-updater to resolve the issue.

Install and configure Git

Install Git if necessary:

$ sudo apt-get install git

Determine the name and e-mail address you intend to use for development, and configure those values with Git. This will likely be an @chromium.org account if you have one. Use your corporate email address if advised by your company (e.g., @google.com address for Googlers).

$ git config --global user.email "yourname@company.com"
$ git config --global user.name "Your Name"

Install depot_tools

depot_tools is a collection of tools that simplify development of Chromium, some of which are essential to the development flow. Download depot_tools and add the location of the tools to your environment's PATH.

$ git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git
$ echo 'PATH=$PWD/depot_tools:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
$ source ~/.bashrc

Note that it is important to put the path to depot_tools at the beginning of the PATH to ensure that only the binaries in this location are used, avoiding conflicts with other binaries of the same name in another location.

Up next

Now that your workstation is ready for development, you'll setup your development Chromebook such that you will be able to deploy your custom builds to the device. If you don't have a development Chromebook, skip ahead to Checkout Chromium to continue with the workstation-only development flow.