Brave Browser

Desktop browser for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Deprecation notice: this repository is for the older Muon (our fork of Electron) version of Brave.
The newer version of the browser (brave-core) can be found here.
Development is being wound down on this version as issues are migrated to the new code-base

If you’re experiencing issues with Brave or would like to contribute, please check out the new code-base instead

For other versions of our browser, please see:

• iPhone - brave/browser-ios
• Android - brave/browser-android-tabs

Downloads

To download the latest release, see our releases page.

You can also visit our website to get the latest stable release (along with a more user-friendly download page).

The Muon version of Brave has only one active release channel: Release. This will be deprecated as we move to brave-core. Both the Beta channel and Developer channel are already using the brave-core code-base.

Community

Join the Q&A community if you’d like to get more involved with Brave. You can ask for help, discuss features you’d like to see, and a lot more. We’d love to have your help so that we can continue improving Brave.

Useful documentation

• See CONTRIBUTING.md for tips and guidelines about contributing.
• See docs/style.md for information on styling.
• See docs/tests.md for information on testing, including how to run a subset of the tests.
• See docs/debugging.md for information on debugging.
• See docs/translations.md to learn how you can help us with translations (localization).
• See docs/linuxInstall.md for information on installing the browser on Linux distributions.

Running from source

If you’re setting up using Windows, please see the Building on Windows wiki entry for a full walkthrough.

For other platforms (macOS, Linux) You’ll need certain packages installed before you can build and run Brave locally.

Prerequisites

1. the current LTS version of nodejs

   Install from your package manager, nvm, or download from https://nodejs.org

2. npm version 5 or greater (to make use of the package-lock.json)

On Debian / Ubuntu /Mint

apt-get install build-essential rpm ninja-build

On Fedora

dnf install rpm-build
dnf group install "Development Tools" "C Development Tools and Libraries"

Installation

After installing the prerequisites:

1. Clone the git repository from GitHub:

    # For beta testers:
    git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
   
    # For devs over HTTPS:
    git clone https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop
   
    # For devs over SSH:
    git clone git@github.com:brave/browser-laptop.git
   

2. Open the working directory:

    cd browser-laptop
   

3. Install the Node dependencies:

    npm install
   

Instead of npm install you may also install with yarn running yarn install.

Troubleshooting

Additional notes on troubleshooting installation issues are in the Troubleshooting page in the Wiki.

Preconfigured VMs

Some platforms are available as pre-configured VMs. See the readme for details.

Running Brave

To run a development version of the browser requires a few steps. The easiest way is just to use two terminals. One terminal can be used just to watch for changes to the code

npm run watch

Now actually run Brave in another terminal

npm start

Some errors related to brave/electron update can be fixed by doing a clean install:

rm -rf node_modules/
npm install

If this does not work, please clear out your ~/.electron first and try again.

Running webdriver tests

To run the webdriver tests

npm run watch-test  or  npm run watch-all

Now run tests in another terminal

npm test

See docs/tests.md for more information.

Port

Brave uses port 8080 to communicate between its client and server sides by default. If you are using port 8080 for something else (e.g. a web proxy) then you can set the node config to make it use a different one.

e.g. npm config set brave:port 9001

Additional notes on troubleshooting development issues are in the Troubleshooting page in the Wiki.

Running inside of a development version of Muon

By default, we provide pre-built binaries when you npm install with our own fork of electron-prebuilt.

If you want to modify the code to Muon (Brave’s Electron fork), then you’ll need to build it. An example of why you might do that would be exposing a new event to the webview (from Muon).

To start this process, you’ll want to check out our browser-laptop-bootstrap repo. From there, you can follow the steps in our wiki to get up and running.

Packaging for bundles, installers, and updates

Please see our wiki entry for more information about packaging.