Use the installation instructions to install a copy of Bazel on your machine.
All Bazel builds take place in a workspace, a directory on your filesystem that contains source code for the software you want to build, as well symbolic links to directories that contain the build outputs (for example, bazel-bin and bazel-out). The location of the workspace directory is not significant, but it must contain a file called WORKSPACE in the top-level directory. The WORKSPACE file may be an empty file, or it may contain references to external dependencies required to build the outputs.
One workspace can be shared among multiple projects if desired. To get started, we'll focus on a simple example with one project.
Suppose that you have an existing project in a directory, say, ~/gitroot/my-project/. Create an empty file at ~/gitroot/my-project/WORKSPACE to show Bazel where your project's root is.
Use the following commands to make a small Java project for this example:
{% highlight bash %} $ # If you're not already there, move to your workspace directory. $ cd ~/gitroot/my-project $ mkdir -p src/main/java/com/example $ cat > src/main/java/com/example/ProjectRunner.java <<EOF package com.example;
public class ProjectRunner { public static void main(String args[]) { Greeting.sayHi(); } } EOF $ cat > src/main/java/com/example/Greeting.java <<EOF package com.example;
public class Greeting { public static void sayHi() { System.out.println(“Hi!”); } } EOF {% endhighlight %}
Bazel figures out what to build by looking for files named BUILD in your workspace, so we'll create a BUILD file in the ~/gitroot/my-project directory. Add the following lines to this BUILD file:
{% highlight python %}
java_binary( name = “my-runner”, srcs = glob([“**/*.java”]), main_class = “com.example.ProjectRunner”, ) {% endhighlight %}
BUILD files are Python-like scripts. BUILD files cannot contain arbitrary Python, but each build rule looks like a Python function call and you can use “#” to start a single-line comment.
java_binary is the type of thing this rule will build. name is the identifier you'll use when you ask bazel to build the binary. srcs lists the Java source files Bazel should compile into a Java binary. glob(["**/*.java"]) is a handy shorthand for “recursively include every file that ends with .java” (see the build encyclopedia for more information about globbing). com.example.ProjectRunner specifies the class that contains the main method.
Now you are ready to build your Java binary:
{% highlight bash %} $ cd ~/gitroot/my-project $ bazel build //:my-runner INFO: Found 1 target... Target //:my-runner up-to-date: bazel-bin/my-runner.jar bazel-bin/my-runner INFO: Elapsed time: 1.021s, Critical Path: 0.83s $ bazel-bin/my-runner Hi! {% endhighlight %}
Congratulations, you've just built your first Bazel target!
Creating one rule to build your entire project may be sufficient for small projects, but as projects get larger it‘s important to break up the build into self-contained libraries that can be assembled into a final product. This way the entire world doesn’t need to be rebuilt on small changes and Bazel can parallelize more of the build steps.
To break up a project, create separate rules for each subcomponent and then make them depend on each other. For the example above, add the following rules to the BUILD file:
{% highlight python %} java_binary( name = “my-other-runner”, srcs = [“src/main/java/com/example/ProjectRunner.java”], main_class = “com.example.ProjectRunner”, deps = [“:greeter”], )
java_library( name = “greeter”, srcs = [“src/main/java/com/example/Greeting.java”], ) {% endhighlight %}
This builds the same files as before, but in a different way: now Bazel will build the greeter library first and then build my-other-runner. Try building and running //:my-other-runner:
{% highlight bash %} $ bazel run //:my-other-runner INFO: Found 1 target... Target //:my-other-runner up-to-date: bazel-bin/my-other-runner.jar bazel-bin/my-other-runner INFO: Elapsed time: 2.454s, Critical Path: 1.58s
INFO: Running command line: bazel-bin/my-other-runner Hi! {% endhighlight %}
Now if you edit ProjectRunner.java and rebuild my-other-runner, Greeting.java will not need to be recompiled.
For larger projects, you will often be dealing with several directories. You can refer to targets defined in other BUILD files using the syntax //path/to/directory:target-name. For example, suppose src/main/java/com/example/ has a cmdline/ subdirectory with the following file:
{% highlight bash %} $ mkdir -p src/main/java/com/example/cmdline $ cat > src/main/java/com/example/cmdline/Runner.java <<EOF package com.example.cmdline;
import com.example.Greeting;
public class Runner { public static void main(String args[]) { Greeting.sayHi(); } } EOF {% endhighlight %}
Runner.java depends on com.example.Greeting, so we could add a BUILD file at src/main/java/com/example/cmdline/BUILD that contained the following rule:
{% highlight python %}
java_binary( name = “runner”, srcs = [“Runner.java”], main_class = “com.example.cmdline.Runner”, deps = [“//:greeter”] ) {% endhighlight %}
However, by default, build rules are private. This means that they can only be referred to by rules in the same BUILD file. This prevents libraries that are implementation details from leaking into public APIs, but it also means that you must explicitly allow runner to depend on //:greeter. As is, if we build runner we'll get a permissions error:
{% highlight bash %} $ bazel build //src/main/java/com/example/cmdline:runner ERROR: /home/user/gitroot/my-project/src/main/java/com/example/cmdline/BUILD:2:1: Target ‘//:greeter’ is not visible from target ‘//src/main/java/com/example/cmdline:runner’. Check the visibility declaration of the former target if you think the dependency is legitimate. ERROR: Analysis of target ‘//src/main/java/com/example/cmdline:runner’ failed; build aborted. INFO: Elapsed time: 0.091s {% endhighlight %}
You can make a rule visibile to rules in other BUILD files by adding a visibility = level attribute. Change the greeter rule in ~/gitroot/my-project/BUILD to be visible to our new rule:
{% highlight python %} java_library( name = “greeter”, srcs = [“src/main/java/com/example/Greeting.java”], visibility = [“//src/main/java/com/example/cmdline:pkg”], ) {% endhighlight %}
This makes //:greeter visible to any rule in the //src/main/java/com/example/cmdline package. Now we can build and run the runner binary:
{% highlight bash %} $ bazel run //src/main/java/com/example/cmdline:runner INFO: Found 1 target... Target //src/main/java/com/example/cmdline:runner up-to-date: bazel-bin/src/main/java/com/example/cmdline/runner.jar bazel-bin/src/main/java/com/example/cmdline/runner INFO: Elapsed time: 1.576s, Critical Path: 0.81s
INFO: Running command line: bazel-bin/src/main/java/com/example/cmdline/runner Hi! {% endhighlight %}
See the build encyclopedia for more visibility options.
If you look at the contents of bazel-bin/src/main/java/com/example/cmdline/runner.jar, you can see that it only contains Runner.class, not its dependencies (Greeting.class):
{% highlight bash %} $ jar tf bazel-bin/src/main/java/com/example/cmdline/runner.jar META-INF/ META-INF/MANIFEST.MF com/ com/example/ com/example/cmdline/ com/example/cmdline/Runner.class {% endhighlight %}
This works for running locally (the runner script Bazel generates adds the greeter jar to the classpath) but will not work if we want to copy runner.jar to another machine and use it as a standalone binary. To build a self-contained jar that can be deployed, build runner_deploy.jar (or, more generally, <target-name>_deploy.jar):
{% highlight bash %} $ bazel build //src/main/java/com/example/cmdline:runner_deploy.jar INFO: Found 1 target... Target //src/main/java/com/example/cmdline:runner_deploy.jar up-to-date: bazel-bin/src/main/java/com/example/cmdline/runner_deploy.jar INFO: Elapsed time: 1.700s, Critical Path: 0.23s {% endhighlight %}
runner_deploy.jar will contain all of its dependencies.
You can now create your own targets and compose them. Next, check out the tutorial to learn how to build a server backend, Android app, and iOS app with Bazel. Also see the build encyclopedia and user manual for more information. Let us know if you have any questions!