Simple way to download Google Chrome/Chromium source code

Question

I thought this would be easy but I can't find any link to a simple tar.gz/tar.bz2/zip archive.

Chrome uses some custom tools like build_depot to even download the source code. But I don't want to compile the source code, I just want to see how they do something in the source code.

So all I need is the source code download link, in the simplest possible form. Is there any way at all to find a zip archive containing all the source code, without reading howtos and building and compiling tools just to be able to download it?

Even old versions would do. I don't need to compile anything, I just need the code, and there are no download links to that.

Solution 1

On the Get the code page you have a link to the source tarball.

Solution 2

Here is an updated way to do it

git clone --depth 1 https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git chromium

The depth argument results in a shallow clone so that you don't pull down the massive history. You can remove it if you want full copy.

This still requires git, but it doesn't require you to install a bunch of custom tools that may mess up your whole system.

Solution 3

Looked at it and it seems on the get the code page there is no mention of a single simple file download - presumably because it's for people actuall willing to develop and work with these sources, and the codebase is complex and needs extra tools (it's similar to Andoroid, which is managed by git but theres a special tool to manage the multitude of single repositories that need to be orchestrated).

So if your just curious to look at one version of the sources, you can browse the code to the tag/revision you like and get the tgz link, for example, the last known good revsion lkgr: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr

Solution 4

There's an enormous archive at https://gsdview.appspot.com/chromium-browser-official/. It contains all versions starting at 14.0, including every daily subversion (14.0.783.0, 14.0.784.0, etc), up to 75.0.3755.0 released yesterday (as of writing).

Unfortunately, the interface is paginated and contains no page jump, so you'll need ~30 clicks on Next Page to reach latest Chrome; as of writing, the quick link to latest is https://gsdview.appspot.com/chromium-browser-official/?marker=chromium-74.0.3711.0.tar.xz.hashe%40.

These tarballs are also .xz rather than .gz; the accepted answer links to a 2.2GiB download, while 75.0.3755.0 at the archive is 721MiB.

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