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Support GN build without using depot_tools #51689
Description
The GN build is documented at #51676, which however requires using depot_tools from Chromium for building, and the code of Node must be checked out in a specific directory structure.
To simplify the GN build for developers who don't work with Chromium, there has been an effort to make GN work without depot_tools:
- The https://github.com/yue/build-gn is a fork of GN that bundles the build configurations of Chromium with it.
- The https://github.com/photoionization/node_with_gn makes uses of the forked GN to build Node without
depot_tools.
There are a few problems left for solving:
- Maintaining the forked GN is a burden.
- Even without the requirement of
depot_tools, the GN build of V8 requires the following dependencies to exist:- abseil-cpp
- icu
- jinja2
- markupsafe
- zlib
- The default configurations of V8 does not work with Node, and we must explicitly pass a list of GN args when generating the build files.
Activity
targos commentedon Feb 7, 2024
Is it an issue even though we include the source of these dependencies in our tree?
zcbenz commentedon Feb 7, 2024
The GN files of V8 hardcodes paths to some dependencies to
//third_party/xxx, I need to add args to allow changing them to//node/deps/xxxto fix them.targos commentedon Feb 7, 2024
OK for
icu. The other ones are in thethird_partydirectory.github-actions commentedon May 23, 2026
This issue has been marked as stale due to 210 days of inactivity.
It will be automatically closed in 30 days if no further activity occurs. If this is still relevant, please leave a comment or update it to keep it open.
github-actions commentedon Jun 22, 2026
This issue has been automatically closed after 30 days of inactivity following its stale status (no activity for a total of 240 days).
If this is still relevant, feel free to reopen it or leave a comment with additional details so we can continue the discussion.