Advanced queries with Bazel

I often need to query complex things with Bazel, an open-source build system from Google that focuses on performance and correctness by enforcing hermetic builds. For a more complete list of examples, see the official Bazel query how-to.

Find all tests marked as size = small that have a database dependency¶

Google tests have a specific size (small, medium, large) with strict time-outs. If a small test exceeds 60 seconds, the test fails. For tests involving a database, the tests need to be marked as medium to avoid flaky timeouts.

bazel query '
  attr(size, small, //server/...:all)
  intersect
  rdeps(//server/...:all,
        //database:test_database)'

For additional convenience, we can pipe this through buildozer, a command line tool to update BUILD files, to update the size attribute for us.

bazel query '<same as above>' |
  xargs -I {} buildozer 'set size medium' {}

Find all binaries that have a dependency on a specific target¶

There are two BUILD labels for our database:

• the full label for binaries included in runtime_deps
• the api label for library and test code

Our database library incorrectly had the full target in the deps attribute which meant all the tests needlessly included the full database. Removing the full target from //server:dao requires three steps:

1. Add //database:full to the runtime_deps of each binary that has a transitive dependency on the full target. This is a no-op if the runtime dependency already exists.

   # Finds all java binaries that depend on full target
   # with a max distance of 10 edges and adds a
   # runtime_dependency.
   blaze query '
     kind("java_binary", allrdeps(//database:full, 10))' |
     xargs -I {} \
       buildozer 'add runtime_deps //database:full' {}
   

2. Add //database:api to the deps of //server:dao.

   buildozer 'add deps //database:api //server:dao'
   

3. Remove //database:full from the deps of //server:dao.

   buildozer 'remove deps //database:full //server:dao'