Bazel was announced on March 24, 2015, by unveiling https://bazel.io and dumping code on https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel. Its development has been somewhat public ever since, but it has never been documented how we got to that point. I was one of the people who started this project, so let me tell you how it happened.
The previous two posts in this series showed how to use runfiles mechanisms
and rules_pkg mechanisms to avoid dealing with canonical repository names
under Bzlmod. However, one special case remains: when you need to depend on the
name of a repository directory, either at build time or runtime. This post
explains how to access canonical repository names in a portable way to solve
such problems. We'll use a macro when we can, and a custom Make
Variable when we can't, including when dealing with alias targets.
This article is part of the series "Around the World with Bazel in Watercolors".
The Sydney to New York route was strategically scheduled via San Francisco to connect with our customers, employees and future customers there—and do some watercolors!
The previous post in our Bzlmod migration series demonstrated how to make runfiles paths portable to a Bzlmod world. Another common source of Bzlmod file path breakages are misconfigured rules from rules_pkg, which contains rules for building archives from build outputs and/or external repositories. This post will explain key details of some of these rules, so you can stop "holding it wrong" and easily migrate archive targets to Bzlmod.
This article is part of the series "Around the World with Bazel in Watercolors".
As the images hint, I was mostly inspired by the rich Tasmanian landscape, which is where we went on a family vacation. I did, however, sandwich that week between working for a week in Sydney and a week in San Francisco. In Sydney I couldn’t pass on an opportunity to meet with our customers while visiting family, and to gather local engineers passionate about Bazel (all 10 of them! 
) from Canva, Splunk, Snap, MongoDB, and more for a Bazel meetup.
The first post in our Bzlmod migration series explained many of the problems that may arise when migrating your project. These next three posts will explore various solutions to problems arising from changes in how Bazel handles repository names under Bzlmod, beginning with runfiles paths. After applying the techniques in this post, your project should be well insulated from runfiles path related breakages, now and well into the future.
This article is part of the series "Around the World with Bazel in Watercolors".
One of the challenges of leading a globally distributed company with employees and customers on 6 continents is making time for meaningful connections with people. I’ve embraced this challenge and turned it into an opportunity. That means combining travel with industry conferences, team summits, customer and future customer relationship development, and product discovery. So far this year, that includes 12 cities (Sydney, San Francisco, New York, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Boston, Munich, Berlin, Cologne, Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle), 71 customer and future customer visits, and gathering a total of 231 engineers at our events, plus meeting up with EngFlow team members.
You may be aware that Bazel will remove support for WORKSPACE in Bazel 9
in favor of Bazel Modules (a.k.a. Bzlmod). The current mainstream release
is Bazel 7.2.0, so there's plenty of time to migrate. However, there's no
time like the present to get started, to avoid further WORKSPACE dependencies
and a pile of migration work in the future.
I recently completed the Bzlmod migration for EngFlow/example and our internal repos. This experience taught me a lot about Bzlmod and about migrating complex projects with challenging dependency issues that I'll share over a few blog posts. I'll also borrow from Sara Adams's earlier post, in which she described an example bzlmod migration based on EngFlow's Bazel Invocation Analyzer repo.
April 1, 2024 was no joke for EngFlow! On this humorous day, we gathered for our annual team summit, meeting this year in Barcelona, Spain. EngFlowers from 11 countries descended upon the beautiful Catalan city to deepen ties to our work and each other. A key priority for the week was our “Happy Team” principle, which serves as the foundation of our company framework: “Happy team, Happy customers, More happy customers.” The summit theme also focused on leaning into EngFlow’s core values of LEAP — Loyalty, Excellence, Adventure, and Perseverance.
As its "{fast, correct} — choose two" tagline promises, a major feature of Bazel is performance. Caching is a key technique Bazel uses to improve build speed. Bazel deploys several kinds and layers of caches. There are so many caches that it’s hard to keep them straight. Additionally, frequently used terms like “action cache” can be ambiguous. This blog post will lay out the major Bazel caching mechanisms.