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.
For now we have partial support for the Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEs for Java. We don't have IDE support for other languages in Bazel right now.
To work with Eclipse, run sh scripts/setup-eclipse.sh
from the root of the source tree and it will create the .project
and the .classpath
files (if a .project
file is present, only the .classpath
will get overwritten). You can then import the project in Eclipse.
You might see some errors in Eclipse concerning Truth assertions.
To work with IntelliJ, run sh scripts/setup-intellij.sh
from the root of the source tree and it will create the necessary project files. You can then open the folder as a project in IntelliJ.
To test out bazel, you need to compile it. There are currently two ways of compiling it:
sh compile.sh
bootstraps Bazel from scratch, first compiling it without using Bazel, then rebuilding it again using the just built Bazel and optionally runs tests, too. The resulting binary can be found at output/bazel
.bazel build //src:bazel
builds the Bazel binary using Bazel 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:
sh compile.sh all
after having removed the output
directory: 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. For IntelliJ, you can refer to Run/Debug Configuration: Remote.Bazel is organized in several parts:
src/main/cpp
provides the command-line interface.src/main/protobuf
.src/main/java
and src/test/java
.src/main/native
.