Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

This page has various notes on troubleshooting the installation process and then running the result when not installing from a pre-built package

Node version

Brave does not work with node.js < 5.0. Please use Node 6.1 and node-gyp 3.3.1

See [Upgrading node.js on Debian and Ubuntu]

Npm issues

While running npm install you will likely see lines like the following which may be safely ignored

npm WARN deprecated [email protected]: Deprecated.
npm WARN install Couldn't install optional dependency: Unsupported

If this fails on Linux with an error related to abp-filter-parser-cpp, try updating to Node 5.5 and node-gyp 3.2.1 (see discussion at https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/214)

If installing on a new machine with little or no node.js previously installed this can take a long time, especially if you are outside the USA and/or have limited bandwidth. In such cases you may also get timeouts which result in failures due to ECONNRESET messages or similar. If this happens. you should simply rerun the npm install command until these stop

Mac specific npm issues

If you're inside a tmux session, you might encounter an issue when the npm install gets to showing the toast notification when the webpack build is complete. If you exit out of tmux and instead use iTerm2 to split your panes, it should work as expected. If you'd like to keep using tmux, you should be able to control+c when the npm install gets to that part (since the build is finished).

Windows specific npm issues

If you're using Cygwin, npm currently has a known issue which is considered wont-fix. While Cygwin is not supported by npm, Inc, you can resolve this issue yourself by patching npm yourself. An alternative is to use the GitHub for Windows shell.

Visual Studio 2015 may require additional configuration, which you can read about here.

Running issues

Since brave has a client and server section, it is necessary to ensure that the two communicate on an unused port. Brave uses port 8080 to communicate between its client and server sides by default. If you are using port 8080 for something else (e.g. a web proxy) then you can set the environment variable BRAVE_PORT to make it use a different one.

e.g. BRAVE_PORT=9001 npm run watch

BRAVE_PORT=9001 npm start

The server section started by run watch does NOT stop when the client quits. You should generally manually terminate the server side before updating to the latest build. There is currently no clean way to do this. One method that works is

kill `ps ax | grep browser-laptop | awk '{print }' | head -n 1`

or on Mac OS X:

pkill -f browser-laptop