I'm trying to sell my team on it, but none of us has experience with bazel. I'm trying to figure out how to do a small poc where we migrate one intermediate thing in the monorepo to bazel and try to prove out how it can take over everything.
- You are going to screw things up a couple times. The documentation for Bazel is not always clear, but you can usually find examples or explanations of complicated stuff on forums somewhere.
- Start with a leaf dependency, something in your codebase that doesn’t depend on anything else. Then work your way up. Just write a WORKSPACE + BUILD.bazel in your root, and then put a BUILD.bazel in the directory for the dependency you are going to work on.
- Look at examples like Tensor Flow, especially for how to handle third-party dependencies (although Tensor Flow is going to do it in a more complicated way).
- Migrate your tests as you go.
- Just run "bazel build //...:all" or "bazel test //...:all" from your project root as you go to make sure things don’t break.
- Undoubtedly it will take a while to develop a good mental model of how Bazel works. For fun, try looking around in the output directories, or look at the sandboxes it creates.
What if I wanted to fork tensorflow and integrate my project into it, would I need the tensorflow fork as something like a git submodule in my main repo, or is there a way to tell bazel there's another repo somewhere else and where it fits into the graph?
I don’t work there, but I have talked to Googlers working on build systems.