Welcome to the WebKit Container SDK, the all-in-one SDK for WebKit GTK/WPE port development.
It provides a fully-equipped container image ready for WebKit development
as well as scripts to run the image using podman.
Once you entered the container, you can navigate to a WebKit checkout
and compile using ./Tools/Scripts/build-webkit [--gtk|--wpe], as usual.
There is extra documentation in the docs subdirectory for further information the SDK provides but the guide below will cover common usage.
- Integrate the SDK with your shell environment.
Add the following to your shell configuration file (e.g. ~/.bashrc, ~/.zprofile, ...)
to ensure that the ${WKDEV_SDK} environment variable points to the correct location
of your webkit-container-sdk Git checkout. It also extends the ${PATH} to make the wkdev-* scripts
provided by this repository accessible without having to specifcy full paths in the shell.
source /absolute/path/to/your/Git/checkout/of/webkit-container-sdk/register-sdk-on-host.shLaunch a new shell, or source your shell configuration files to verify, ${WKDEV_SDK}
now expects as intented - pointing to your webkit-container-sdk checkout.
- Create a new wkdev container for WebKit development
Execute the following command on your host system:
wkdev-create --create-homeThis will create a container named wkdev by default or a custom one with --name
and it will create a new home directory for the sdk in ${HOME}/wkdev-home by default
or a custom one with --home.
Within the container, the ${HOME} directory is not equal to the host ${HOME} directory:
${HOME}/wkdev-home (from host) is bind-mounted into the container as /home/${USER}.
This avoids pollution of files in your host ${HOME} directory and for convenience
it's still exposed in the container, as ${HOST_HOME}.
NOTE: wkdev-create will auto-detect the whole environment: X11, Wayland, PulseAudio, etc.
and eventually needs root permissions on the host system to perform first-time-run-only
initializations (such as allowing GPU profiling, by modifying root-owned config files, etc.)
- Enter the new wkdev container
Execute the following command on your host system:
wkdev-enter --name wkdev
After a few seconds you enter the container shell.
- Verify host system integration is working properly
You may optionally run the test script in the container, which tests various workloads:
wkdev-test-host-integration- Compile WPE WebKit
cd "${HOST_HOME}/path/to/your/WebKit/checkout"
./Tools/Scripts/build-webkit --wpe --releaseTo run tests / execute MiniBrowser, try;
./Tools/Scripts/run-webkit-tests --wpe --release fast/css # Full tests take a long time
./Tools/Scripts/run-minibrowser --wpe https://browserbench.org/MotionMark1.2/- READY!
You should check, once in a while, if there is a new upstream version of the wkdev-sdk image available.
- Use the
wkdev-updatetool.
Run wkdev-update and following the instructions to selectively update the base images of your local
containers. under the hood it deleted the old containers and re-creates them using the new base image
and your previous settings. NOTE: Any changes to the container filesystem will VANISH.. Modifications
to e.g. /etc config files in the container, manually installed packages, etc. will disappear. Only the
container home directory will stay untouched.
- READY!
Since you will be regularly re-creating containers there is support for automatically running a script
after each container is created. You can do this by making a .wkdev-firstrun script in the directory
you specify as your SDK home (${HOME}/wkdev-home by default). This script runs as your user but has
permissions to use sudo for tasks such as installing packages. An example script:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# This example is a bash script but it can be any executable file.
# Install extra applications like your favorite editor.
sudo apt-get install --yes micro
# The hostname is set to the name of the container so you could
# for example have a specific one where you always work on a library.
if [[ "$(hostname -s)" == "wkdev-foo" ]]; then
jhbuild --no-interact build glib
fi