In general, we prefer contributions that fix bugs or add features (as opposed to stylistic, refactoring, or “cleanup” changes). Please check with us on the dev list before investing a lot of time in a patch. Meet other Bazel contributors on IRC (irc.freenode.net#bazel).
For now we have support for IntelliJ, and partial support for the Eclipse IDE for Java. We don't have IDE support for other languages in Bazel right now.
git clone https://bazel.googlesource.com/bazelcd bazel && bazel build //src:bazelbazel-bin/src/bazel.If everything works fine, feel free to configure your favorite IDE in the following steps.
To work with IntelliJ:
Preferences > Other Settings > Bazel Settings).File > Import Bazel Project...) with the following settings:Import from workspace and choose the scripts/ij.bazelbuild file as the Project view.Preferences > Editor > Code Style > Java, click Manage, then Import) and use it when working on Bazel's code.To work with Eclipse:
git clone https://bazel.googlesource.com/bazelFile > New > Other > Import Bazel Workspace).src > main > java and src > test > java as directories and add //src/main/java/... and //src/test/java/... as targets.To test out bazel, you need to compile it. To compile a development version of Bazel, you need a the latest released version of bazel, which can be compiled from source.
bazel build //src:bazel builds the Bazel binary using bazel from your PATH and the resulting binary can be found at bazel-bin/src/bazel. This is the recommended way of rebuilding Bazel once you have bootstrapped it.
In addition to the Bazel binary, you might want to build the various tools Bazel uses. They are located in //src/java_tools/..., //src/objc_tools/... and //src/tools/... and their directories contain README files describing their respective utility.
When modifying Bazel, you want to make sure that the following still works:
bazel build //:bazel-distfile. After unzipping it in a new empty directory, run bash compile.sh all there. It rebuilds Bazel with ./compile.sh, Bazel with the compile.sh Bazel and Bazel with the Bazel-built binary. It compares if the constructed Bazel builts are identical and then runs all bazel tests with bazel test //src/... //third_party/ijar/.... This is what we use at Google to ensure that we don't break Bazel when pushing new commits, too.Start creating a debug configuration for both C++ and Java in your .bazelrc with the following:
build:debug -c dbg build:debug --javacopt="-g" build:debug --copt="-g" build:debug --strip="never"
Then you can rebuild Bazel with bazel build --config debug //src:bazel and use your favorite debugger to start debugging.
For debugging the C++ client you can just run it from gdb or lldb as you normally would. But if you want to debug the Java code, you must attach to the server using the following:
--host_jvm_debug before the command (e.g., bazel --batch --host_jvm_debug build //src:bazel).jdb for instance, run jdb -attach localhost:5005. From within Eclipse, use the remote Java application launch configuration.Bazel is organized in several parts:
src/main/cpp provides the command-line interface.src/main/protobuf.src/main/java and src/test/java.tools/build_rules. If you want to add rules, consider using Skylark first.com.google.devtools.build.lib.rules and in com.google.devtools.build.lib.bazel.rules. You might want to read about the Challenges of Writing Rules first.src/main/native.