---
layout: documentation
title: Best practices
---

# Best Practices

This page assumes you are familiar with Bazel and provides guidelines and
advice on structuring your projects to take full advantage of Bazel's features.

The overall goals are:

- To use fine-grained dependencies to allow parallelism and incrementality.
- To keep dependencies well-encapsulated.
- To make code well-structured and testable.
- To create a build configuration that is easy to understand and maintain.

These guidelines are not requirements: few projects will be able to adhere to all of them.  As the
man page for lint says, "A special reward will be presented to the first person to produce a real
program that produces no errors with strict checking." However, incorporating as many of these
principles as possible should make a project more readable, less error-prone, and faster to build.

This page uses the requirement levels described in
[this RFC](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt).

## Running builds and tests

A project should always be able to run `bazel build //...` and `bazel test //...` successfully on
its stable branch. Targets that are necessary but do not build under certain circumstances (e.g.,
require specific build flags, do not build on a certain platform, require license agreements)
should be tagged as specifically as possible (e.g., "`requires-osx`"). This tagging allows
targets to be filtered at a more fine-grained level than the "manual" tag and allows someone
inspecting the BUILD file to understand what a target's restrictions are.

## Third-party dependencies

You may declare third-party dependencies:

*   Either declare them as remote repositories in the WORKSPACE file.
*   Or put them in a directory called `third_party/` under your workspace directory.

## Depending on binaries

Everything should be built from source whenever possible. Generally this means that, instead of
depending on a library `some-library.so`, you'd create a BUILD file and build `some-library.so`
from its sources, then depend on that target.

Always building from source ensures that a build is not using a library that was built with
incompatible flags or a different architecture. There are also some features like coverage,
static analysis, or dynamic analysis that will only work on the source.

## Versioning

Prefer building all code from head whenever possible.  When versions must be used, avoid including
the version in the target name (e.g., `//guava`, not `//guava-20.0`). This naming makes the library
easier to update (only one target needs to be updated).  It is also more resilient to diamond
dependency issues: if one library depends on `guava-19.0` and one depends on `guava-20.0`, you
could end up with a library that tries to depend on two different versions. If you created a
misleading alias to point both targets to one guava library, then the BUILD files are misleading.

## Using the `.bazelrc` file

For project-specific options, use the configuration file your
`<workspace>/.bazelrc` (see [bazelrc format](guide.html#bazelrc)).

If you want to support per-user options for your project that you **do not** want to check
into source control, include the line
```
try-import %workspace%/user.bazelrc
```
(or any other file name) in your `<workspace>/.bazelrc` and
add `user.bazelrc` to your `.gitignore`.

## Packages

Every directory that contains buildable files should be a package. If a BUILD file refers to files
in subdirectories (e.g., `srcs = ["a/b/C.java"]`) it is a sign that a BUILD file should be added to
that subdirectory.  The longer this structure exists, the more likely circular dependencies will be
inadvertently created, a target's scope will creep, and an increasing number of reverse
dependencies will have to be updated.