Bazel Tools (Deprecated)

Bazel integration for Visual Studio Code. If you also want to have syntax highlighting for BUILD and WORKSPACE files take a look at bazel-code. The current version is meant to be a preview and might have heavy bugs.

Update: The bazel team now officially started developing vscode-bazel which provides a more feature rich integration for bazel. This extension is therefore deprecated and will not be published anymore.

Features

• Running bazel commands from within Visual Studio Code. Detect which targets are available in a WORKSPACE and choose one.
• Generation of project files for code navigation and auto-completion used by other third party language extensions, e.g. c_cpp_properties.json for C/C++ or .classpath for Java
• Generate and show the dependency graph of a target

Commands

• Bazel: Create C++ Project: Creates a c_cpp_properties.json file that contains all transitive include paths starting from a root C++ target. Takes also the used toolchain into account and uses their system include directories.
• Bazel: Create Java Project: Classpath generation.
• Bazel: Build: Builds a target chosen from the shown label list.
• Bazel: Run: Runs a *_binary target chosen from the shown label list.
• Bazel: Clean: Cleans up the output directories.
• Bazel: Show dependencies graph

For each command listed above there is also a button available in the status bar.

Requirements

• A recent version of bazel

Roadmap

• Add commands for bazel fetch and test and provide a user friendly interface for them, especially for query. Here we could implement a graph view within vscode that visualizes the dependencies and shows up useful information for each target.

• Extend the language support, especially Java.

Tasks:

• Implement a target picker based on bazel query and build the selected target based on the user decision. Use vscodes terminal for that purpose.
• Implement the run command.
• Implement the vs_code_aspect that generates programming language dependent descriptor files. Traverses all C++ dependencies and outputs all include paths known to bazel. Installs the aspect as well as a BUILD file into the users workspace in order to make it 'applicable'.
• Generation of c_cpp_properties.json file based on bazel aspects output. We use descriptors of any C++ kind.
• Cleanup temporary descriptor files after generation
• Check bazel installation and WORKSPACE on startup and report the status to the user
• Check the usage on other platforms than linux.
• Implement test cases.
• Add more language support. Currently the focus is on C++. Building targets is language independent.
• Add language information for each target chosen from the target picker.
• Consider the visibility of each target
• Dive deeper into JS and develop a solid extension architecture.
• Provide buttons for build and run.
• Wrap the bazel commands into a class with a handy interface.

Contribute

Let me know if you have any suggestions or if you want to contribute. I am happy about any support. The current status is far away from a release version but you can simply check it out and try it in your vscode editor by running:

npm install

Then you can run it in the developer mode.

Thank you goes out to the following contributors for pushing the project forward:

• zaucy
• quentingodeau