JavaScript rules for Bazel
Circle CI | Bazel CI |
---|---|
The nodejs rules integrate NodeJS development toolchain and runtime with Bazel.
This toolchain can be used to build applications that target a browser runtime, so this repo can be thought of as "JavaScript rules for Bazel" as well. (We would call this rules_javascript
if renames weren't so disruptive.)
This repository is maintained by volunteers in the Bazel community. Neither Google, nor the Bazel team, provides support for the code. However, this repository is part of the test suite used to vet new Bazel releases.
We follow semantic versioning. Patch releases have bugfixes, minor releases have new features. Only major releases (1.x, 2.x) have breaking changes. We strive to give you an easy upgrade path when we do introduce a breaking change by documenting a migration path. If you use code from an /internal
path, or the labs package, these are not subject to our support policy and may have breaking changes or removals with no warning or migration path.
Documentation
Comprehensive documentation for installing and using the rules, including generated API docs: https://bazelbuild.github.io/rules_nodejs/
Quickstart
This is the fastest way to get started. See the installation documentation for details and alternative methods, or if you already have a Bazel project and you're adding Node/JavaScript support to it.
$ npx @bazel/create my_workspace
$ cd my_workspace
The
npx
tool is distributed with node. If you prefer, you can run equivalent commandsnpm init @bazel
oryarn create @bazel
. If you've used@bazel/create
before, you may want to usenpx @bazel/create@latest
to get the most recent version. Run without any arguments to see available command-line flags.
Adopters
Thanks to the following active users!
Open-source repositories:
- Angular: Angular monorepo, CLI, Components, Universal
- Tensorflow: tf.js and tensorboard
- Selenium
- NgRX
- tsickle
- incremental-dom
- dataform
- Kubernetes test-infra
- ts-protoc-gen
- protoc-gen-ts
Organizations:
Not on this list? Send a PR to add your repo or organization!
User testimonials
From Lewis Hemens at Dataform:
At Dataform we manage a number of NPM packages, Webpack builds, Node services and Java pipelines across two separate repositories. This quickly became hard for us to manage, development was painful and and deploying code required a many manual steps. We decided to dive in and migrate our build system entirely to Bazel. This was a gradual transition that one engineer did over the course of about 2 months, during which we had both Bazel and non bazel build processes in place. Once we had fully migrated, we saw many benefits to all parts of our development workflow:
- Faster CI: we enabled the remote build caching which has reduced our average build time from 30 minutes to 5 (for the entire repository)
- Improvements to local development: no more random bash scripts that you forget to run, incremental builds reduced to seconds from minutes
- Simplified deployment processes: we can deploy our code to environments in Kubernetes with just one command that builds and pushes images
- A monorepo that scales: adding new libraries or packages to our repo became easy, which means we do it more and end up write more modular, shared, maintainable code
- Developing across machine types: our engineers have both Macbooks and Linux machines, bazel makes it easy to build code across both
- Developer setup time: New engineers can build all our code with just 3 dependencies - bazel, docker and the JVM. The last engineer to join our team managed to build all our code in < 30 minutes on a brand new, empty laptop
From Jason Bedard at Allocadia:
At Allocadia we use Bazel as the primary build system in a monorepo consisting of multiple applications, services and deployments across a range of technologies. Bazel has provided many benefits over previous build systems including:
- reduced CI pipeline time from 60+ to 5-10 minutes
- increased build and testing stability
- improved developer ergonomics such as initial setup, faster more consistent local builds
The use of rules_nodejs has provided these benefits across multiple Angular/TypeScript applications, Karma+Jasmine testing, Rollup, npm packaging, protobuf client/server communication, and a variety of Node.js based tooling.