Ensure that you have OpenJDK 8 installed on your system. For a system based on debian packages (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu), install OpenJDK 8 by running the command sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk.
The standard way of compiling a release version of Bazel from source is to use a distribution archive. Download bazel-<VERSION>-dist.zip from the release page for the desired version. We recommend to also verify the signature made by our release key 48457EE0. The distribution archive also contains generated files in addition to the versioned sources, so this step cannot be short cut by using a checkout of the source tree.
Unzip the archive and call bash ./compile.sh; this will create a bazel binary in output/bazel. This binary is self-contained, so it can be copied to a directory on the PATH (such as /usr/local/bin) or used in-place.
version 0.4.4 and below: compile.sh may fail right after start with an error like this:
File not found - *.jar no error prone jar
Workaround is to run this (and add it to your ~/.bashrc):
export PATH="/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH"
version 0.4.3 and below: compile.sh may fail fairly early with many Java compilation errors. The errors look similar to:
C:\...\bazel_VR1HFY7x\src\com\google\devtools\build\lib\remote\ExecuteServiceGrpc.java:11: error: package io.grpc.stub does not exist
import static io.grpc.stub.ServerCalls.asyncUnaryCall;
^
This is caused by a bug in one of the bootstrap scripts (scripts/bootstrap/compile.sh). Manually apply this one-line fix if you want to build Bazel purely from source (without using an existing Bazel binary): 5402993a5e9065984a42eca2132ec56ca3aa456f.
version 0.3.2 and below: github issue #1919