Bazel builds

Overview

Building with Bazel offers a deterministic, faster build, including creating smaller container images.

While bazel works well for small projects, building with kubernetes still has a few challenges. We take the following approach:

  • We use Bazelisk, which automatically picks the correct version of Bazel for a branch
  • We don’t yet generate files in bazel - we use external scripts (for now)
  • We vendor our dependencies, rather than relying on gazelle (although actually gazelle works, the issue is when external dependencies like apimachinery include bazel files that confuse gazelle)
  • We strip bazel files from external dependencies, so we don’t confuse gazelle

How to run

  1. make bazel-build
  2. make bazel-build-cli
  4. # To build end to end and upload to s3
  5. make bazel-upload

Test:

  1. make bazel-test

Regenerate bazel files using gazelle:

  1. make gazelle

Other changes needed

  • By default the go_test command doesn’t allow tests to use data. So we need to use data = glob(["testdata/**"]), or similar. We add # keep to stop gazelle from removing it. data doesn’t make it easy to access files in a parent directory, so we’ll have to clean up some of the test / package structure.