Google Bazel - Google open-sources its internal build automation software

[Arthur]

Bazel (a.k.a Blaze) is what Google use internally to build almost all of their software. From what I have read it's meant to be one of the best build automation tools currently available. As of today, it has now been open-sourced.

 

Website / Download / FAQ / Getting Started / User Manual

 

Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment, including:

 

• A massive, shared code repository, in which all software is built from source. Bazel has been built for speed, using both caching and parallelism to achieve this. Bazel is critical to Google's ability to continue to scale its software development practices as the company grows.
  
• An emphasis on automated testing and releases. Bazel has been built for correctness and reproducibility, meaning that a build performed on a continuous build machine or in a release pipeline will generate bitwise-identical outputs to those generated on a developer's machine.
  
• Language and platform diversity. Bazel's architecture is general enough to support many different programming languages within Google, and can be used to build both client and server software targeting multiple architectures from the same underlying codebase.
  

Find more background about Bazel in our FAQ

 

System Requirements

 

Supported platforms:

Ubuntu Linux

Mac OS X

 

Java

Java JDK 8 or later

 

Why are you opening up Bazel?

Building software should be fun and easy, and slow and unpredictable builds take the fun out of programming.

 

Why would I want to use Bazel?

Bazel may give you faster build times because it can recompile only the files that need to be recompiled. Similarly, it can skip re-running tests it knows haven't changed.

 

Bazel produces deterministic results. This eliminates skews between incremental vs clean builds, laptop vs CI system, etc.

 

Bazel can build different client and server apps with the same tool from the same workspace. For example, you can change a client/server protocol in a single commit, and test that the updated mobile app works with the updated server, building both with the same tool, reaping all the aforementioned benefits of Bazel.