A workspace is a directory that contains the source files for one or more software projects, as well as a WORKSPACE file and BUILD files that contain the instructions that Bazel uses to build the software. It also contains symbolic links to output directories in the Bazel home directory.
A workspace directory can be located anywhere on your filesystem. In this tutorial, your workspace directory is $HOME/examples/tutorial/, which contains the sample project files you cloned from the GitHub repo in the previous step.
Note that Bazel itself doesn't make any requirements about how you organize source files in your workspace. The sample source files in this tutorial are organized according to common conventions for Android apps, iOS apps and App Engine applications.
For your convenience, set the $WORKSPACE environment variable now to refer to your workspace directory. At the command line, enter:
$ export WORKSPACE=$HOME/examples/tutorial
Every workspace must have a text file named WORKSPACE located in the top-level workspace directory. This file may be empty or it may contain references to external dependencies required to build the software.
For now, you‘ll create an empty WORKSPACE file, which simply serves to identify the workspace directory. In later steps, you’ll update the file to add external dependency information.
Enter the following at the command line:
$ touch $WORKSPACE/WORKSPACE
This creates the empty WORKSPACE file.
Now that you've set up your workspace, you can build the Android app.