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We’re partway through a migration of our We’ve migrated the cockroach build system to Bazel. Bazel is a modern build system with better performance characteristics and correctness guarantees than we currently have with make/go build. Today, you can perform almost all day-to-day CRDB dev tasks with Bazel rather than with make. make is deprecated and we will remove this option for building Cockroach at some point in the next release cycle.

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• Bazel has a configuration file called .bazelrc. You can put a global configuration file at ~/.bazelrc or a per-repository file at .bazelrc.user in the root of your cockroach repo.Tired of running ./dev gen bazel? Set the ALWAYS_RUN_GAZELLE env-var to automatically run ./dev gen bazel before every dev test or dev build incantation. Note this

• While Bazel is the “official” build system, you do not have to use it for normal development. For example, many people do development from their IDE’s, and this is expected to “just work”. Note that since not all generated code is checked into the repo, you’ll first have to generate code to get much of it to build from a non-Bazel build system. We refer to this as the “escape hatch”. This escape hatch is specifically supported so if you have difficulty running a test in another build system after generating code, that’s a bug you should report. You can run the following commands to make this happen:

  • dev gen go

    • Generates all .go code that goes into the build, including cgo code

  • dev gen cgo

    • Generates some stub files that tell cgo how to link in the c-deps; part of dev gen go

  • dev gen protobuf

    • Generates all .pb.go/.pb.gw.go files; part of dev gen go

• Tired of running ./dev gen bazel? Set the ALWAYS_RUN_GAZELLE env-var to automatically run gazelle before every dev test or dev build incantation. Note this does add a tiny delay – noticeable when iterating on small tests through dev test.

  • i.e. echo 'export ALWAYS_RUN_GAZELLE=1' >> ~/.zshrc

  • Note that gazelle is only a subset of the aactions that dev gen bazel performs. This by itself is able to handle most updates to the code, but is not able to handle things like vendoring new dependencies (dev gen bazel can do this for you).

• If you have ccache installed, bazel will fail with an error like ccache: error: Failed to create temporary file for /home/alyshanjahani/.ccache/tmp/message_li.stdout: Read-only file system. To avoid this you should get the ccache links out of your PATH manually (i.e. uninstall ccache), and then you might need to do bazel clean --expunge.

  • Alternatively, if you would like to use Bazel with ccache, you can enable support for writing outside the sandbox by adding the following to your $HOME/.bazelrc or <repo>/.bazelrc.user file:
    - For MacOS/Darwin:

    Code Block
    build --sandbox_writable_path=/Users/<USER>/Library/Caches/ccache/

    - For Linux:

    Code Block
    build --sandbox_writable_path=/home/<USER>/.ccache

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