How to check out and build Skia on Windows

originally written by epoger@google.com on 2 June 2011

status: updated as of 23 March 2012

Prerequisites

Make sure the following have been installed:

Visual C++ 2010 Express

available for free download at http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/#2010-Visual-CPP
other versions of Visual Studio 2010 should work, as long as they include C++ support
see note below about building using the Visual Studio 2008 IDE

Windows SDK v7.0

available for free download at http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=3138

Subversion (svn) client

available for free download at http://subversion.apache.org/packages.html#windows or http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads.html
make sure the installer changes your %PATH% environment variable to include the directory with the "svn.exe" binary

Python

available for free download at http://www.python.org/download/releases/
versions 2.6.4 and 2.7.2 are known to work; version 3.2 did not work for me
make sure the installer changes your %PATH% environment variable to include the directory with the "python.exe" binary

Check out the source code

To anonymously check out a read-only copy of the Skia source code, open a Command Prompt and run the following commands:

rem Modify the below line to install wherever you like
set SKIA_INSTALLDIR=%HOMEPATH%\src\skia
mkdir %SKIA_INSTALLDIR%
cd %SKIA_INSTALLDIR%
svn checkout http://skia.googlecode.com/svn/trunk

If you plan to make changes, see instructions for downloading a writable copy within http://code.google.com/p/skia/wiki/DownloadingSkiaCode .

Generate Visual Studio projects

We use the open-source gyp tool to generate Visual Studio projects (and analogous build scripts on other platforms) from our multiplatform "gyp" files.

You can generate the Visual Studio projects by running gyp_skia, as follows:

cd %SKIA_INSTALLDIR%\trunk
python gyp_skia
rem Or, to generate buildfiles for SKIA_SCALAR_IS_FIXED:
python gyp_skia -Dskia_scalar=fixed

Or, you can just rely on it being run automatically by the "make" examples shown below.

Note that you will see a bunch of Warnings like the following when you run gyp_skia. They are the result of a gyp bug, but they should not prevent you from building your code successfully.

Warning: Missing input file C:\Users\epoger\src\skia\test\gyp\pdf.gyp
Warning: Missing input file C:\Users\epoger\src\skia\test\gyp\experimental.gyp
...

Build and run tests from the command line

(Like all command-line builds shown on this page, this will automatically run the gyp_skia script to generate the platform-specific build files, and then run the build. Also, it must be run from within the trunk/ directory.)

make tests
out\Debug\tests

By default, the target is built in Debug mode (SK_DEBUG is defined, and debug symbols are included in the binary). If you would like to build the Release version instead:

make tests BUILDTYPE=Release
out\Release\tests

Build and run tests in the Visual Studio IDE

Generate the Visual Studio project files by running gyp_skia as described above
Open a File Explorer window pointing at the %SKIA_INSTALLDIR%\trunk\out\gyp directory
Double-click on tests.sln to start Visual Studio and load the project
When Visual Studio starts, you may see an error dialog stating that "One or more projects in the solution were not loaded correctly"... but there's probably nothing to worry about.
In the "Solution Explorer" window, right-click on the "tests" project and select "Set as StartUp Project".
In the "Debug" menu, click on "Start Debugging" (or just press F5). If you get a dialog saying that the project is out of date, click on "Yes" to rebuild it.
Once the build is complete, you should see console output from the tests in the "Output" window at lower right.

Build and run SampleApp in Visual Studio

Generate the Visual Studio project files by running gyp_skia as described above
Open a File Explorer window pointing at the %SKIA_INSTALLDIR%\trunk\out\gyp directory
Double-click on SampleApp.sln
When Visual Studio starts, you may see an error dialog stating that "One or more projects in the solution were not loaded correctly"... but there's probably nothing to worry about.
In the "Debug" menu, click on "Start Debugging" (or just press F5). If you get a dialog saying that the project is out of date, click on "Yes" to rebuild it.
Once the build is complete, you should see a window with various example graphics. To move through the sample app, use the following keypresses:

right-arrow key: cycle through different test pages
left-arrow key: cycle through rendering methods for each test page
other keys are defined in SampleApp.cpp’s SampleWindow::onHandleKey() and SampleWindow::onHandleChar() methods

Build and run gm ("golden master") tests from the command line

This will display the return value (0 = success) after running the tests...

make gm
out\Debug\gm -r gm\base-win
echo %ERRORLEVEL%

You can also adjust the type used to represent SkScalar. By default, we use a float. To change that, run it as follows. (It should return an errorlevel of -1, because the base-win base images don't match the output when skia_scalar=fixed.)

make gm GYP_DEFINES=skia_scalar=fixed
out\Debug\gm -r gm\base-win-fixed
echo %ERRORLEVEL%

Build and run bench (performance testbench) from the command line

Since bench tests performance, it usually makes more sense to run it in Release mode...

make bench BUILDTYPE=Release
out\Release\bench -repeat 2

Build tools

make tools
out\Debug\skdiff

Clean up all generated files

make clean

Building with Visual Studio 2008

This isn't supported, but the following steps were observed to work on 11/21/2011:

Edit gyp_skia in the trunk directory and remove (or comment out) this line:

args.extend(['-Gmsvs_version=2010'])

Run "python gyp_skia" in trunk.
Open out\skia.sln in Visual Studio 2008
Build