layout: documentation title: Windows

Building Bazel on Windows

Windows support is highly experimental. Known issues are marked with label “Windows” on github issues.

We currently support only 64 bit Windows 7 or higher and we can only compile msys2 binaries.

To bootstrap Bazel on Windows, you will need:

  • Java JDK 8 or later
  • msys2 (need to be installed at C:\tools\msys64\).
  • Several msys2 packages. Use the pacman command to install them: pacman -S gcc git curl zip unzip zlib-devel

To build Bazel:

  • Open the msys2 shell.
  • Clone the Bazel git repository as normal.
  • Set the environment variables:
export JAVA_HOME="$(ls -d C:/Program\ Files/Java/jdk* | sort | tail -n 1)"
export TMPDIR=c:/temp
export BAZEL_SH=c:/tools/msys64/usr/bin/bash.exe

  • Run ``compile.sh`` in Bazel directory.

  • If all works fine, bazel will be built at ``output\bazel.exe``.