Build from sources

Prerequisites

Lightpanda is written with Zig 0.14.0. You will have to install it with the right version in order to build the project.

You need also to install Rust for building deps.

Lightpanda also depends on zig-js-runtime (with v8), Libcurl and html5ever .

To be able to build the v8 engine for zig-js-runtime, you have to install some libs:

For Debian/Ubuntu based Linux:


sudo apt install xz-utils ca-certificates \
        pkg-config libglib2.0-dev \
        clang make curl git

For MacOS, you need Xcode and the following pacakges from homebrew:


brew install cmake

Install Git submodules

The project uses git submodules for dependencies.

To init or update the submodules in the vendor/ directory:


make install-submodule

This is an alias for git submodule init && git submodule update.

Build and run

You an build the entire browser with make build or make build-dev for debug env.

But you can directly use the zig command to run in debug mode:


zig build run

ℹ️

The build will download and build V8. It can takes a lot of time, more than 1 hour. You can save this part by donwloading manually a [pre-built](https://github.com/lightpanda-io/zig-v8-fork/releases version) and use the -Dprebuilt_v8_path= option.

Embed v8 snapshot

Lighpanda uses v8 snapshot. By default, it is created on startup but you can embed it by using the following commands:

Generate the snapshot.


zig build snapshot_creator -- src/snapshot.bin

Build using the snapshot binary.


zig build -Dsnapshot_path=../../snapshot.bin

See #1279 for more details.