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Say hello to the new bazel.build website

Today, the new https://bazel.build/ website has finally launched. This is the first step in a larger evolution of Bazel's documentation story. Much of the content remains the same (the eagle-eyed among you may notice a few new pages), but this change marks a new era of Bazel documentation.

What motivated this change?

The Bazel site migration is more than just a fresh coat of paint. One of the underlying motivations for this change is to empower the Bazel community to make more changes to Bazel's documentation. Before the migration, Bazel's website was built on Google documentation infrastructure. While the capabilities of that infrastructure were largely sufficient for Bazel's needs up to now, the contribution experience was not.

Today's https://bazel.build/ is built on Mintlify. With this new platform, each incoming documentation pull request to Bazel is automatically greeted with a preview. For even faster iteration, you can build the site locally. These improvements eliminate guesswork, and better equip contributors to make changes to the Bazel docs with confidence.

You can browse Mintlify's documentation to learn the syntax for rich documentation features.

Content is king

High-quality documentation is a powerful resource — especially with the advent of fully autonomous agentic workflows. While the Bazel website has amassed valuable information over the years, the exercise of refining, organizing, and evolving the accessibility of this information has been an uphill battle.

There's much to learn about Bazel, and high-quality educational resources have been a popular request from Bazel users. Today, we open the door to a better future for Bazel documentation.

A community effort

While we're proud to have contributed to this effort, special thanks are in order to several members of the Bazel community for their leadership in this project:

  • Alan Mond - Alan started this discussion with his blog post, and then brought the initiative to life. We wouldn't be here today without Alan's leadership. He kept the ball rolling at every step along the way, and rallied the Bazel community behind him.
  • Florian Weikert - Florian stepped up as the maintainer of the previous Bazel site infrastructure to assist in the migration. This migration would not have been possible without Florian's help. Whether it was fixes to docs, changes to the documentation pipelines, or helping with things only Googlers can do, Florian did an incredible amount of work to support this effort.
  • Alex Eagle - Alex was an early contributor to this migration, and amplified the work. Alex gave this idea even more momentum, and laid important groundwork that brought to life the site you see today.

This launch marks just the beginning of the story. If you've considered contributing to Bazel's documentation, now is a better time than ever. There's always more work to do, and we hope that you'll join us in the #documentation channel of the Bazel slack.