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Integrating Bazel with IDEs

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This page covers how to integrate Bazel with IDEs, such as IntelliJ, Android Studio, and CLion (or build your own IDE plugin). It also includes links to installation and plugin details.

IDEs integrate with Bazel in a variety of ways, from features that allow Bazel executions from within the IDE, to awareness of Bazel structures such as syntax highlighting of the BUILD files.

If you are interested in developing an editor or IDE plugin for Bazel, please join the #ide channel on the Bazel Slack or start a discussion on GitHub.

IDEs and editors {:#ides-editors}

IntelliJ, Android Studio, and CLion {:#intellij-android-clion}

Official plugin for IntelliJ, Android Studio, and CLion. The plugin is open source{: .external}.

This is the open source version of the plugin used internally at Google.

Features:

• Interop with language-specific plugins. Supported languages include Java, Scala, and Python.
• Import BUILD files into the IDE with semantic awareness of Bazel targets.
• Make your IDE aware of Starlark, the language used for Bazel's BUILD and .bzlfiles
• Build, test, and execute binaries directly from the IDE
• Create configurations for debugging and running binaries.

To install, go to the IDE's plugin browser and search for Bazel.

To manually install older versions, download the zip files from JetBrains' Plugin Repository and install the zip file from the IDE's plugin browser:

• Android Studio plugin{: .external}
• IntelliJ plugin{: .external}
• CLion plugin{: .external}

Xcode {:#xcode}

rules_xcodeproj{: .external}, Tulsi{: .external}, and XCHammer{: .external} generate Xcode projects from Bazel BUILD files.

Visual Studio Code {:#visual-studio-code}

Official plugin for VS Code.

Features:

• Bazel Build Targets tree
• Starlark debugger for .bzl files during a build (set breakpoints, step through code, inspect variables, and so on)

Find the plugin on the Visual Studio marketplace{: .external}. The plugin is open source{: .external}.

See also: Autocomplete for Source Code

Atom {:#atom}

Find the language-bazel package{: .external} on the Atom package manager.

See also: Autocomplete for Source Code

Vim {:#vim}

See bazelbuild/vim-bazel on GitHub{: .external}

See also: Autocomplete for Source Code

Emacs {:#emacs}

See bazelbuild/bazel-emacs-mode on GitHub{: .external}

See also: Autocomplete for Source Code

Visual Studio {:#visual-studio}

Lavender{: .external} is an experimental project for generating Visual Studio projects that use Bazel for building.

Eclipse {:#eclipse}

Bazel Eclipse Feature{: .external} is a set of plugins for importing Bazel packages into an Eclipse workspace as Eclipse projects.

Autocomplete for Source Code {:#autocomplete-for-source-code}

C Language Family (C++, C, Objective-C, and Objective-C++)

hedronvision/bazel-compile-commands-extractor enables autocomplete, smart navigation, quick fixes, and more in a wide variety of extensible editors, including VSCode, Vim, Emacs, Atom, and Sublime. It lets language servers, like clangd and ccls, and other types of tooling, draw upon Bazel's understanding of how cc and objc code will be compiled, including how it configures cross-compilation for other platforms.

Java

georgewfraser/java-language-server - Java Language Server (LSP) with support for Bazel-built projects

Automatically run build and test on file change {:#bazel-watcher}

Bazel watcher{: .external} is a tool for building Bazel targets when source files change.

Building your own IDE plugin {:#build-own-plugin}

Read the IDE support blog post to learn more about the Bazel APIs to use when building an IDE plugin.