A Dockerized environment to build Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF)

This is a docker environment to build CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework). It builds CEF for x64 and for ARM64.

Pre-requisites

1. Install Docker
2. (optional) Install docker-compose
3. (optional) Manage Docker as a non-root user

Note: although, docker-compose is listed as optional above, but this file does not provide instructions for how to build CEF with docker engine only, thus docker-compose is recommended for simplicity.

Run

Note: older versions of docker engine and docker-compose may throw exceptions. See Troubleshooting section.

To build for ARM64:

$ cef_arch=arm64 docker-compose run --rm cef

To build for x64:

$ cef_arch=x64 docker-compose run --rm cef

The environment will:

1. Build CEF artifacts
2. Archive them (with 7z)
   1. The format of a filename of a resulting archive is cef-chromium_git-{cef_arch}-{date}T{time}.7z
3. Put them to ./cef/output on the host OS

What to expect

1. It takes many hours to build CEF for x64 and even more hours to build for ARM64.
2. It builds Debug and Release artifacts in one pass.

Sizes of resulting images:

$ docker images
REPOSITORY               TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
cef                      x64                 c0af0fb651fc        5 hours ago         61.7GB
cef                      arm64               2478382404a1        13 hours ago        65.1GB

Sizes of 7z artifacts:

$ ls -lh ~/code/cef-dockerized/cef/output/
total 17G
-rw-r--r-- 1 root   root   5.2G Aug  9 09:42 cef-chromium_git-arm64-2020.08.09T16:14:59.7z
-rw-r--r-- 1 root   root   6.2G Aug  9 17:22 cef-chromium_git-x64-2020.08.09T23:57:22.7z

Sizes of unzipped artifacts:

$ du -ch -d0 ~/tmp/cef-chromium_git-x64-2020.08.09T23\:57\:22/
31G     ~/tmp/cef-chromium_git-x64-2020.08.09T23:57:22/

$ ls -lh ~/tmp/cef-chromium_git-x64-2020.08.09T23:57:22/chromium_git/chromium/src/out/Release_GN_x64/libcef.so
812M Aug  9 16:44 libcef.so

$ ls -lh ~/tmp/cef-chromium_git-x64-2020.08.09T23:57:22/chromium_git/chromium/src/out/Release_GN_x64/cefsimple
2.4M Aug  9 16:44 cefsimple

There are also all sorts of static libraries that are generated during a build

$ find ~/tmp/cef-chromium_git-x64-2020.08.09T23:57:22/chromium_git/chromium/src/out/Release_GN_x64/cefsimple -name '*.a' | wc -l
1269

Troubleshooting

Q: cef_arch=x64 docker-compose run --rm cef raises the following error and does not build:

cef_arch=x64 docker-compose run --rm cefERROR: Invalid interpolation format for "image" option in service "cef": "cef:${cef_arch:?cef_arch [arm64,x64] docker-compose run ...}"

A: docker-compose.yml of this project uses version: 3.8, make sure your docker engine is of supported version 19.03.0+ and docker-compose is latest per https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-versioning/. The most recent version of docker-compose can be installed from here https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/.

Refs

1. MasterBuildQuickStart: Linux Setup
2. AutomatedBuildSetup
3. CEF Forum