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DZone > DevOps Zone > Have you ever looked at your build? I mean, really looked at your build?

Have you ever looked at your build? I mean, really looked at your build?

Kristina Chodorow user avatar by
Kristina Chodorow
·
Apr. 25, 15 · DevOps Zone · Interview
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Bazel has a feature that lets you see a graph of your build dependencies. It could help you debug things, but honestly it’s just really cool to see what your build is doing.

To try it out, you’ll need a project that uses Bazel to build. If you don’t have one handy, here’s a tiny workspace you can use:

$ git clone https://github.com/kchodorow/tiny-workspace.git
$ cd tiny-workspace

Make sure you’ve downloaded and installed Bazel and add the following line to your ~/.bazelrc:

query --package_path %workspace%:[path to bazel]/base_workspace

There should already be a line in your ~/.bazelrc that is almost identical to this, but starts with “build”. So, when you’re done, it’ll look something like:

build --package_path %workspace%:/home/k/gitroot/bazel/base_workspace
query --package_path %workspace%:/home/k/gitroot/bazel/base_workspace

(except your username probably isn’t “k”).

Now run bazel query in your tiny-workspace/ directory, asking it to search for all dependencies of //:main and format the output as a graph:

$ bazel query 'deps(//:main)' --output graph > graph.in

This creates a file called graph.in, which is a text representation of the build graph. You can use dot (install with sudo apt-get install graphviz) to create a png from this:

$ dot -Tpng < graph.in > graph.png

If you open up graph.png, you should see something like this:

graph

You can see //:main depends on one file (//:main.cc) and four targets (//:x, //tools/cpp:stl, //tools/default:crosstool, and //tools/cpp:malloc). All of the //tools targets are implicit dependencies of any C++ target: every C++ build you do needs the right compiler, flags, and libraries available, but it crowds your result graph. You can exclude these implicit dependencies by removing them from your query results:

$ bazel query --noimplicit_deps 'deps(//:main)' --output graph > simplified_graph.in

Now the resulting graph is just:

graph

Much neater!

If you’re interested in further refining your query, check out the docs on querying.

Build (game engine)

Published at DZone with permission of Kristina Chodorow, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

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