Chrome DevTools frontend

The client-side of the Chrome DevTools, including all JS & CSS to run the DevTools webapp.

It is available on NPM as the chrome-devtools-frontend package. It's not currently available via CJS or ES2015 modules, so consuming this package in other tools may require some effort.

Package versioning

The version number of the npm package (e.g. 1.0.373466) refers to the Chromium commit position of latest frontend git commit. It's incremented with every Chromium commit, however the package is updated roughly daily.

Source code

The frontend is available through a git subtree mirror on chromium.googlesource.com, with a regularly updating GitHub mirror at github.com/ChromeDevTools/devtools-frontend. The codebase's true location is in third_party/blink/renderer/devtools/ in Chromium's git repo.

Getting Started

1. Clone the repo
2. Go to repo root and run: npm start
   • This launches Chrome Canary and starts the dev server with 1 command
3. Go to http://localhost:9222#custom=true&experiments=true

Power user tips:

You can customize the port for the dev server: e.g. PORT=8888 npm start.

You can also launch chrome and start the server separately:

• npm run chrome
• npm run server

When you start Chrome separately, you can pass extra args to Chrome:

npm run chrome -- https://news.ycombinator.com

(e.g. this launches Hacker News on startup)

If you want to reset your development profile for Chrome, pass in "--reset-profile":

npm start -- --reset-profile

OR

npm run chrome -- --reset-profile

Hacking

• DevTools documentation: devtools.chrome.com
• Debugging protocol docs and Chrome Debugging Protocol Viewer
• awesome-chrome-devtools: recommended tools and resources
• Contributing to DevTools: bit.ly/devtools-contribution-guide
• Contributing To Chrome DevTools Protocol: docs.google.com

Useful Commands

Simpler npm commands w/ dtrun

If you want to run these npm commands anywhere in the chromium repo (e.g. in chromium/src), you'll want to setup our dtrun CLI helper.

One-time setup:

npm run setup-dtrun

Now, you can use any of the following commands by simply doing: dtrun test.

In addition, you no longer need to pass double dashes (e.g. --) before you pass in the flags. So you can do: dtrun test -d inspector/test.html.

npm run format

Formats your code using clang-format

npm run format-py

Formats your Python code using yapf

Note: Yapf is a command line tool. You will have to install this manually, either from PyPi through pip install yapf or if you want to enable multiprocessing in Python 2.7, pip install futures

npm test

Builds devtools and runs all inspector/devtools web tests.

Note: If you're using a full chromium checkout and compiled content shell in out/Release, then npm test uses that. Otherwise, with only a front-end checkout (i.e. cloning from GitHub), then npm test will fetch a previously compiled content shell from the cloud (and cache it for future test runs).

npm test basics

# run specific tests
npm test -- inspector/sources inspector/console

# debug a specific test. Any one of:
npm run debug-test inspector/cookie-resource-match.html
npm test -- --debug-devtools inspector/cookie-resource-match.html 
npm test -- -d inspector/cookie-resource-match.html 

# pass in additional flags to the test harness
npm test -- -f --child-processes=16

# ...for example, use a higher test timeout
npm test -- --time-out-ms=6000000 <test_path>

Tip

: Learn about the test harness flags

--fetch-content-shell

# If you're using a full chromium checkout and have a compiled content shell, 
# this will fetch a pre-compiled content shell. This is useful if you 
# haven't compiled your content shell recently
npm test -- --fetch-content-shell

--target=SUB_DIRECTORY_NAME

# If you're using a build sub-directory that's not out/Release, 
# such as out/Default, then use --target=SUB_DIRECTORY_NAME
npm test -- --target=Default

Development

• All devtools commits: View the log, RSS feed or @DevToolsCommits on Twitter
• All open DevTools tickets on crbug.com
• File a new DevTools ticket: new.crbug.com
• Code reviews mailing list: devtools-reviews@chromium.org

Getting in touch

• @ChromeDevTools on Twitter

• Chrome DevTools mailing list: groups.google.com/forum/google-chrome-developer-tools