macOS Development Environment

Prerequisites

You will need the prerequisites below to build Brave on macOS 10.15+.

There are additional details in the Chromium build system requirements at https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/docs/mac_build_instructions.md#system-requirements (do not follow any of the instructions after system requirements):

• NodeJS LTS Version - currently 12.x (brew install node@12) - can also use nvm

If node --version fails when installing node@12 through Homebrew or reports a different version, run brew link --force --overwrite node@12

• npm 6.x (or Yarn)

npm is automatically installed if you install NodeJS through Homebrew. Please ensure that you're really using npm 6.x by running npm --version, npm 7 (or later) does not work. Note: If you'd like to use yarn instead of npm you can use yarn import to create a yarn.lock file from our package-lock.json.

Other tips

• Make sure you have Spotlight fully off or privacy on for the build directory (or indexing will slow it down). System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy

• If you see Connection to github.com closed by remote host adding the following lines to ~/.ssh/config:

    ServerAliveInterval 60
    ServerAliveCountMax 100