Examples

Frameworks

Angular

Bazel can run any toolchain you want, so there is more than one way to use it with Angular. See Alex's post Angular ❤️ Bazel update for a longer explanation.

Architect: The first approach is the simplest: use Architect (aka. Angular CLI Builders). This is the build tool inside of Angular CLI, so your existing application will continue to work the same way, and you can still get support from the Angular team. This may be a good choice if your goal is just to include an Angular app in a full-stack Bazel build that includes your backend, and making the Angular build&test faster is not important for you.

However, it has the worst performance because the level of incrementality is only as fine as how many libs your application is composed from. Bazel can only make a build more parallel and incremental if you express a wider dependency graph to it.

Example: examples/angular_bazel_architect

Google: This toolchain is what we originally advertised as "Angular Buildtools Convergence" (ABC). It is based on Google's internal toolchain for building Angular, and has good performance characteristics. However it is harder to migrate to, because it doesn't have good compatibility for existing applications.

The example has its own guide: examples/angular

Custom: Bazel is excellent for advanced use cases where you need to customize your toolchain. Take any off-the-shelf tools, follow their README's to call their CLI, and assemble them together in a custom way. This lets you take advantage of the latest JS ecosystem innovations without waiting for tooling vendors to assemble it all together for you.

React

Similar to the explanation above for Angular, Bazel is agnostic to what tools you choose to run on your project. However, the benefits of using Bazel are unlocked as you adopt it as your build system. We think the following examples show a typical migration of adopting Bazel:

create-react-app: If you run create-react-app, it will install a build system called react-scripts. As a first step into Bazel, you can simply ask Bazel to wrap the existing build system. This guarantees compatibility with your current code, and if your objective is just to include a frontend app into a bigger full-stack Bazel build, this might be the final step in the migration. However it will run react-scripts as a single Bazel action, which means that you gain no incrementality benefit. So we expect for most applications this is just a first step.

The create-react-app example shows how this will look. We suggest reading the README in that example, and also look at the commit history to that directory as an illustration of how we started from create-react-app and added Bazel bits.

react-scripts-like: As a next step to make our Build more incremental and performant, we can replace the react-scripts build system with Bazel, but preserve compatibility as much as possible by having Bazel run mostly the same tools with mostly identical configuration. We continue to transpile TS to JS using Babel, for example, but we do it in a build step before invoking Webpack, just using the Babel CLI.

This is a good middle ground to get some benefits from Bazel while staying on the same supported tools as react-scripts.

TODO(alexeagle): build an example illustrating how this looks

custom: If you really know your JS build tools, Bazel is the perfect way to assemble all the myriad individual tools into a custom toolchain. This allows you to unlock any part of the JS ecosystem without waiting for it to be integrated for you by maintainers of a project like create-react-app, who have a very high bar for adding features since the maintenance and support burden falls on them. However you'll need to understand both the tools as well as Bazel to successfully build your own toolchain.

There is a basic example at examples/react_webpack but it needs a lot more work to show everything that is possible!

Vue

We don't have a dedicated example yet, but Vue has been known to work. Follow https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_nodejs/issues/1840 for an example.

Svelte

None yet, please file an issue if you need this.

Test Runners

Jest

There is a dedicated example for Jest: examples/jest

Cypress

We have done some early work to run Cypress under Bazel. Follow https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_nodejs/issues/1904 for an example.

Mocha

Example at examples/webapp has a simple mocha_test

Karma and Protractor

See Protractor usage in examples/app

Bundlers

Webpack

See examples/react_webpack

Rollup

The example at examples/webapp uses Rollup, and produces an app with ES5 and ES2015 variants ("differential loading") that gives faster loading in modern browsers without dropping support for legacy ones.

Parcel

The example in examples/parcel shows how to write a custom rule, it happens to use the parcel binary to build. It's a very minimal example but might be enough to get you started.

Language tooling

LESS, Sass, Stylus

See styles directory inside the examples/app example.

TypeScript

Most of the examples show TypeScript usage. Also look in packages/typescript/test for lots of handling of edge cases.

Kotlin

The Kotlin language can compile to JS. The result has a very large stdlib JS payload, so we don't recommend this for most uses.

Example at examples/kotlin

Google Closure Compiler

rules_closure is a whole-cloth approach to using Bazel if you're fully bought-into the Closure ecosystem.

examples/closure shows a very simple way to call the closure compiler without jumping into that ecosystem.

Protocol Buffers and gRPC

Note: this is under active development. Come chat in the #javascript channel on Slack to get the latest. Support and stability are not great but expected to improve.

There are many alternative implementations for protobuf and RPC. We generally intend to support all of them, with a small layer in rules_nodejs that allows you to build around any of those tools.

https://github.com/rules-proto-grpc/rules_proto_grpc is an excellent, broad ruleset based on the tooling from http://grpc.io. We may point to this as the canonical example in the future.

The @bazel/labs package has an experimental ts_proto_library rule. It integrates with the "concatjs" bundler and is suitable for projects using ts_library. However it's not clear whether this will be promoted to a stable API. See the example in examples/protocol_buffers

protobuf.js from https://github.com/dcodeIO is a simple alternative. See the example in examples/protobufjs

Bazel-specific

Bazel Persistent Workers

If you want to speed up Bazel by keeping some tools running warm in the background as daemons, there's a good readme in the examples/worker