macOS Development Environment

Prerequisites

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

Xcode 13.1 or higher is recommended and needed for official builds. Xcode 12.5 can be used in development for now with component builds.

You'll want an SDK setup like this:

ls -la /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs

MacOSX.sdk -> /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX11.3.sdk
MacOSX11.3.sdk -> /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX11.3.sdk
MacOSX12.0.sdk

You can get the 12.0 SDK from https://ci.brave.com/userContent/ (VPN required)

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 (brew install node) - 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

• npm (or Yarn)

npm is automatically installed if you install NodeJS through Homebrew 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