Build Android apps using Bazel
Prior to creating this I had no knowledge of Bazel other than it's name, and I'm still not knowledged in it. This is just an example to help me understand it better over time.
This repository is a newly generated Android Studio project with a near blank activity.
Bazel (version 0.1.4-jdk7) is setup to compile this project.
Installation was a breeze.
Obviously it is not as 'simple' as the Gradle Wrapper. The Gradle Wrapper is nice if you're not normally an Android Developer, you litterally just call ./gradlew <task> and you're building. Ignoring that fact, setting up bazel was easy, and if you were to upgrade your app's install guide it would be a one-liner addition.
The conventions are nice. The only things required to get up and going with Bazel is a WORKSPACE, and BUILD files.
-
The
WORKSPACEfile is located in your project root and is used for Bazel to contextualize itself in the subdirectories for theBUILDfiles. -
The
BUILDfiles are closer to the actual thing you want to build. So in this case,app/.
I can see great benefit on this convention. This convention makes it pretty simple to split off subprojects, or in the opposite way of forming monorepositories.
If you're hoping to continue to use Gradle and slowly migrate into Bazel, if you don't have git config core.ignorecase set to false you're going to have a bad time.
Bazel and Gradle both use the /build/i filename.
-
Bazel's
BUILDis used to hold build targets -
Gradle's
build/is the directory built targets get put.
So if git config core.ignorecase == false, Gradle is going to overwrite your Bazel BUILD file.
Otherwise, git config core.ignorecase == true Gradle won't be able to overwrite the Bazel BUILD file and die.
This is a serious issue with convention. As far as I found, changing what Bazel looks at for a BUILD file is not possible.
| Bazel | Gradle | |
|---|---|---|
build / assembleDebug from clean |
TODO | TODO |
build / assembleDebug with cache |
TODO | TODO |
install |
TODO | TODO |