layout: documentation title: Installing Bazel on Ubuntu

Install Bazel on Ubuntu

Supported Ubuntu Linux platforms:

  • 16.04 (LTS)
  • 15.10
  • 14.04 (LTS)

Install Bazel on Ubuntu using one of the following methods:

Bazel comes with two completion scripts. After installing Bazel, you can:

Using Bazel custom APT repository (recommended)

1. Add Bazel distribution URI as a package source (one time setup)

echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://storage.googleapis.com/bazel-apt stable jdk1.8" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/bazel.list
curl https://bazel.build/bazel-release.pub.gpg | sudo apt-key add -

If you want to use the JDK 7, please replace jdk1.8 with jdk1.7 and if you want to install the testing version of Bazel, replace stable with testing.

2. Install and update Bazel

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install bazel

Once installed, you can upgrade to a newer version of Bazel with:

sudo apt-get upgrade bazel

Install with installer

We provide binary installers on our GitHub releases page

The installer only contains Bazel binary, some additional libraries are required to be installed on the machine to work.

1. Install JDK 8

To install OpenJDK 8:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk

2. Install other required packages

sudo apt-get install pkg-config zip g++ zlib1g-dev unzip

3. Download Bazel

Download the Bazel installer for your operating system.

4. Run the installer

Run the installer:

chmod +x bazel-<version>-installer-<os>.sh
./bazel-<version>-installer-<os>.sh --user

The --user flag installs Bazel to the $HOME/bin directory on your system and sets the .bazelrc path to $HOME/.bazelrc. Use the --help command to see additional installation options.

5. Set up your environment

If you ran the Bazel installer with the --user flag as above, the Bazel executable is installed in your $HOME/bin directory. It's a good idea to add this directory to your default paths, as follows:

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/bin"

You can also add this command to your ~/.bashrc file.