Compilation database with Bazel

If you use Bazel and want to use libclang based editors and tools, you can now generate JSON compilation database easily without using build intercept hooks. The advantage is that you can generate the database even if your source code does not compile, and the generation process is much faster.

For more information on compilation database, Guillaume Papin has an excellent article.

How to Use

Make the files in this github repo available somewhere in your repo, and run the generate.sh script. This will create a compile_commands.json file at your workspace root. For example,

RELEASE_VERSION=0.3.5
curl -L https://github.com/grailbio/bazel-compilation-database/archive/${RELEASE_VERSION}.tar.gz | tar -xz
bazel-compilation-database-${RELEASE_VERSION}/generate.sh

An alternative to running the generate.sh script is to define a target of rule type compilation_database with the attribute targets as a list of top-level cc_.* labels which you want to include in your compilation database. For example,

## Replace workspace_name and dir_path as per your setup.
load("@workspace_name//dir_path:aspects.bzl", "compilation_database")

compilation_database(
    name = "example_compdb",
    targets = [
        "//a_cc_binary_label",
        "//a_cc_library_label",
    ],
    # ideally should be the same as `bazel info execution_root`.
    exec_root = "/path/to/bazel/exec_root",
)

ycmd

If you want to use this project solely for semantic auto completion using ycmd (YouCompleteMe) based editor plugins, then the recommended approach is to set your extra conf script to the bundled .ycm_extra_conf.py. With this, you don't have to maintain a separate compile_commands.json file through a script and/or a compilation_database target. Compile commands are fetched from bazel as the files are opened in your editor.

The easiest way to set up this project for use by YouCompleteMe is to install this project as a vim plugin with your favourite plugin manager. The plugin will sets g:ycm_global_ycm_extra_conf and instruments bazel with the correct paths. e.g. Using Plugged add the following to your vimrc.

Plug 'grailbio/bazel-compilation-database'

An alternative approach is to follow the instructions as above for making the files available in this repo somewhere in the workspace, and then configure vim to use the .ycm_extra_conf.py script that you just extracted. One way is to make a symlink to the py script from the top of your workspace root. Another way is to set the ycm_global_ycm_extra_conf variable in vim.

Contributing

Contributions are most welcome. Please submit a pull request giving the owners of this github repo access to your branch for minor style related edits, etc.

Known Issues

Please check open issues at the github repo.

We have tested only for C and C++ code, and with tools like YouCompleteMe, rtags, and the woboq code browser.

Alternatives

Kythe: uses Bazel action listeners
Bear: uses build intercept hooks