Error while trying to install brave-browser

[alzamer]

Hello
I wanted to start contributing to Brave. Currently I’m using ubuntu 20.04. I cloned the brave-browser repo, installed dependencies and ran

npm run init

This script went for a while, and I’ve encountered an error, to which log I post down below:

0 info it worked if it ends with ok
1 verbose cli [ '/usr/bin/node', '/usr/bin/npm', 'run', 'init' ]
2 info using [email protected]
3 info using [email protected]
4 verbose run-script [ 'preinit', 'init', 'postinit' ]
5 info lifecycle [email protected]~preinit: [email protected]
6 info lifecycle [email protected]~init: [email protected]
7 verbose lifecycle [email protected]~init: unsafe-perm in lifecycle true
8 verbose lifecycle [email protected]~init: PATH: /usr/share/npm/node_modules/npm-lifecycle/node-gyp-bin:/home/michal/brave-browser/node_modules/.bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin
9 verbose lifecycle [email protected]~init: CWD: /home/michal/brave-browser
10 silly lifecycle [email protected]~init: Args: [ '-c', 'node ./scripts/init.js' ]
11 silly lifecycle [email protected]~init: Returned: code: 1  signal: null
12 info lifecycle [email protected]~init: Failed to exec init script
13 verbose stack Error: [email protected] init: `node ./scripts/init.js`
13 verbose stack Exit status 1
13 verbose stack     at EventEmitter.<anonymous> (/usr/share/npm/node_modules/npm-lifecycle/index.js:332:16)
13 verbose stack     at EventEmitter.emit (events.js:198:13)
13 verbose stack     at ChildProcess.<anonymous> (/usr/share/npm/node_modules/npm-lifecycle/lib/spawn.js:55:14)
13 verbose stack     at ChildProcess.emit (events.js:198:13)
13 verbose stack     at maybeClose (internal/child_process.js:982:16)
13 verbose stack     at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (internal/child_process.js:259:5)
14 verbose pkgid [email protected]
15 verbose cwd /home/michal/brave-browser
16 verbose Linux 5.13.0-37-generic
17 verbose argv "/usr/bin/node" "/usr/bin/npm" "run" "init"
18 verbose node v10.19.0
19 verbose npm  v6.14.4
20 error code ELIFECYCLE
21 error errno 1
22 error [email protected] init: `node ./scripts/init.js`
22 error Exit status 1
23 error Failed at the [email protected] init script.
23 error This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.
24 verbose exit [ 1, true ]

How can fix it?

[edwada]

I think I had the same error while running it on windows, what solved for me was to move my clone into the root, the github page notes:

Clone the Brave repository to C:\

We recommend cloning the brave-browser Git repository to the top level of your C:\ drive because:

• Some developers have encountered problems with paths exceeding 256 chars when the repository is cloned to a subdirectory.
• Some developers have encountered problems with paths that contain spaces (e.g. the path to your home directory, if your username contains spaces) and some of Chromium’s build tools.

This is for windows, pointed out on the windows requirements page: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Windows-Development-Environment

I haven’t developed on Ubuntu but I noticed the instructions seem substantially different so you might want to check out the linux requirements page: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Linux-Development-Environment