Downloading a private release asset from GitHub given only its name and tag requires a complicated series of interactions with the GitHub API. This blog post explains how to write two repository rules which make dealing with private release assets in Bazel easy.
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A quick tip on how to execute multiple run commands in parallel.
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This blog post explains how to use a custom C++ toolchain based on clang 12 with libc++-12 in Bazel on Ubuntu 20.04.
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Bazel supports scaling out builds with a remote execution system. Unfortunately, it is very easy for ruleset authors to release rules that work when executed locally but do not work when executed remotely. This blog post explains ruleset authors can set up a simple remote execution system to verify that their rulesets work correctly.
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In Bazel, stamping is the process of embedding additional information into built
binaries, such as the source control revision or other workspace-related information.
Rules that support stamping typically include an integer stamp attribute, where
1 means “always stamp”, 0 means “never stamp”, and -1 means “use the Bazel
build --stamp flag. This blog post explains how to write a rule that supports
these values.
Many Bazel attributes support the use of predefined variables
and functions such as @D for output directory or
$(location //foo:bar) to get the path to a label. But what
if you want to apply some sort of tranformation to these
variables, or define your own custom make variables? This
blog post explains how.
Bazel developers are currently working on adding the ability to
retrieve secrets using a credential-helper executable, similar
to how other tools like Docker and Git handle managing secrets.
Until then, the recommended approach is to store secrets in
~/.netrc. This blog post explains how to write a custom Bazel
rule which reads secrets from ~/.netrc.
In general, one should never check in binary artifacts into Git; it is better
to retrieve them from an artifact repository or a website using http_archive().
However, sometimes convenience is more important than ideological purity.
To handle these cases, I wrote a simple workspace rule named local_archive().
When writing Bazel tests using sh_test(), I often find myself needing to compare
two collections for equivalence. For example, I might compare a directory listing
against a set of expected files or directories, or the list of files and directories
in a .tar file against a set of expected items. This blog post provides some tips
and tricks as to how to do so.
Dealing with Bazel runfiles is one of the most annoying things about using Bazel. Fortunately, Bazel provides a library to make resolving runfiles from Bash scripts easy.
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sh_test is my most commonly used test rule by far. It is the easiest way to
write quick-and-dirty tests and works nearly everywhere. For anything beyond
the most trivial tests, I use Bazel’s Bash unit test framework. This explains
what the framework is and how to use it.
A quick tip for today:
When creating a new ruleset, particularly on GitHub, start with the official Bazel rules template. It includes a number of features out of the box that are rather tiresome to implement yourself.
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At work, we have a number of custom-written Bazel rulesets stored in organization repositories on GitHub1. This post explains how we use these non-public rulesets in our Bazel projects.
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For most Bazel projects, I strongly recommend using a single Bazel workspace per source code repository. However, it can be occasionally useful to nest multiple workspaces within a single repository. For example, when I’m writing Bazel rulesets, I will often create test cases that contain own workspace with a slightly different configuration in order to test various workspace-level configuration settings for the ruleset, while maintaining a root workspace which is the primary workspace for the ruleset.
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Bazel users commonly need to manage multiple different configurations when building and testing software, such as:
As developers know, virtually all compilers support the notion
of compilation mode, e.g.. whether to compile the code in debug
or release mode. In Bazel, this concept is built natively into
the build system itself. When compiling software using bazel build,
one can select a compilation mode using the --compilation_mode
(often shorted to -c) flag.
When writing a custom Bazel ruleset, it is important to carefully separate its public interface from its private implementation and be deliberate and careful about changes to the public interface. Here’s the pattern I use when I’m writing rulesets to handle this.
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Let’s say you are using Bazel to build a C program which links against a system-provided version of libcurl, the multiprotocol file transfer library. What is the best way to link your program against this library within Bazel? This blog post provides an answer to that question.
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This post describes a pattern for implementing a continuous integration (CI) pipeline using Bazel. This pattern is my starting point whenever I set up a new Bazel-based project in CI, after which I add any project-specific pipeline customizations.
This pipeline is purely about the CI (build to release) stages of a pipeline. A full continuous delivery (CD) pipeline, which includes deployment, will be discussed in a later post.
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In Bazel, a successful build should be a quiet build. While build failures
should, of course, print ample information to stderr to aide in troubleshooting,
any custom Bazel code you write should not output progress information to stdout
or stderr. Let Bazel be responsible for overall build progress reporting.
Yesterday, I explained how you can wrap a bazel run target with
a sh_binary() to execute arbitrary code both before and after
the run target, which is particularly useful for retrieving secrets
from a secret management system and passing them to the run target.
If you are passing secrets via environment variables that are retrieved
by command-line programs, there’s an even easier way to do it – use the
command rule from Atlassian’s bazel-tools repo and its
raw_environment attribute.
An executable rule which can be executed via bazel run is the natural
way to model interactions with external systems in Bazel such as uploading
build artifacts to a remote artifact repository. For example, imagine
a rules_artifactory ruleset which includes a rule artifactory_push()
executable rule which uploads a compiled .dpkg to an Artifactory
apt repository, or a rules_docker ruleset which has a rule
docker_push() which pushes a Docker image to a remote image repository.
When I first started writing custom Bazel rules, I often created
separate rules for the build and run commands in Bazel. This
was a mistake.
When writing custom rules, you often need to invoke executables with
argument lists. For example, let’s say you are writing a custom rule
that executes gcc to compile a set of input source files. You
could write:
Bazel started on Linux and Mac OS, and most people use Bazel on these platforms exclusively, but Bazel can execute on Windows as well. However, Windows has enough idiosynchatic differences that writing a single, operating-system agnostic rule that executes on both Windows and Linux/Mac is quite hard. Often it is easiest to have the rule detect whether it is running on Windows and execute different behavior.
Read more...When writing a custom rule that generates files, be sure to add prefixes to all filenames so that multiple instances of your rule can be instantiated within the same Bazel package.
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One tends to write a lot of Bash scripts when using Bazel. In order to make these scripts more robust, enable Bash’s unofficial strict mode by starting all scripts like this:
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Bazel requires all files to end with LF (not CR-LF) in order to work correctly.
If you are performing cross-platform Bazel development with Windows users, you
can force this setting for all text files in your repo by creating a
.gitattributes file with the following content:
