Windows support is experimental. Known issues are marked with label “Windows” on github issues.
We currently support only 64 bit Windows 7 or higher and we compile Bazel as a msys2 binary.
See instructions on the installation page.
Before you can compile or run Bazel, you will need to set some environment variables:
export JAVA_HOME="$(ls -d C:/Program\ Files/Java/jdk* | sort | tail -n 1)" export BAZEL_SH=c:/tools/msys64/usr/bin/bash.exe
If you run outside of bash, ensure that msys-2.0.dll is in your PATH (if you install msys2 to c:\tools\msys64, just add c:\tools\msys64\usr\bin to PATH).
If you have another tool that vendors msys2 (such as msysgit), then c:\tools\msys64\usr\bin must appear in your PATH before entries for those tools.
Similarly, if you have bash on Ubuntu on Windows installed, you should make sure c:\tools\msys64\usr\bin appears in PATH before c:\windows\system32, because otherwise Windows' bash.exe is used before msys2's.
Use where msys-2.0.dll to ensure your PATH is set up correctly.
To run Bazel (even pre-built binaries), you will need:
Java JDK 8 or later
msys2 shell (need to be installed at C:\tools\msys64\). * We build against version 20160205, you will need this version in order to run the pre-built release Bazel binaries. * You can also use newer versions or the latest version, but then you will need to compile Bazel from the distribution archive (the source zip file) so that it's linked against the right version of msys-2.0.dll. See also the known issues.
Several msys2 packages. Use the pacman command to install them:
pacman -Syuu gcc git curl zip unzip zlib-devel
To compile Bazel, in addition to the above you will need:
Ensure you have the requirements.
To build Bazel:
compile.sh in Bazel directory.output\bazel.exe.Bazel now supports building C++, Java and Python targets on Windows.
To build C++ targets, you will need:
Visual Studio
We are using MSVC as the native C++ toolchain, so please ensure you have Visual Studio installed with the Visual C++ > Common Tools for Visual C++ and Visual C++ > Microsoft Foundation Classes for C++ features. (which is NOT the default installation type of Visual Studio). You can set BAZEL_VS environment variable to tell Bazel where Visual Studio is, otherwise Bazel will try to find the latest version installed.
For example: export BAZEL_VS="C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0"
Python
Both Python 2 and Python 3 are supported. Currently, we use Python wrapper scripts to call the actual MSVC compiler, so please make sure Python is installed and its location is added into PATH. It's also a good idea to set BAZEL_PYTHON environment variable to tell Bazel where Python is.
For example: export BAZEL_PYTHON=C:/Python27/python.exe
Bazel will auto-configure the location of Visual Studio and Python at the first time you build any target. If you need to auto-configure again, just run bazel clean then build a target.
If everything is set up, you can build C++ target now!
bazel build examples/cpp:hello-world ./bazel-bin/examples/cpp/hello-world.exe bazel run examples/cpp:hello-world
However, with Bazel version prior to 0.5.0, MSVC toolchain is not default on Windows, you should use flag --cpu=x64_windows_msvc to enable it like this:
bazel build --cpu=x64_windows_msvc examples/cpp:hello-world
Building Java targets works well on Windows, no special configuration is needed. Just try:
bazel build examples/java-native/src/main/java/com/example/myproject:hello-world ./bazel-bin/examples/java-native/src/main/java/com/example/myproject/hello-world bazel run examples/java-native/src/main/java/com/example/myproject:hello-world
On Windows, we build a self-extracting zip file for executable Python targets, you can even use python ./bazel-bin/path/to/target to run it in native Windows command line (cmd.exe). See more details in this design doc.
bazel build examples/py_native:bin ./bazel-bin/examples/py_native/bin python ./bazel-bin/examples/py_native/bin # This works in both msys and cmd.exe bazel run examples/py_native:bin