Aspect CLI
Aspect CLI (aspect) is wrapper for Bazel, built on top of Bazelisk, that adds additional features and extensibility to the popular polyglot build system from Google.
Why Aspect CLI?
Every organization has a different engineering culture and developer stack.
Bazel was designed for Google's workflows, not yours.
Many companies have found they have to write a wrapper around Bazel.
This starts out as a small need to shim something in the developer workflow, and is often an
untested Bash script living in /tools/bazel which Bazelisk understands as a wrapper script.
Over time, the wrapper accumulates more code, and is a constant source of developer distress.
Licenses
Aspect CLI
Aspect CLI is licensed under the Aspect Community License.
We intend for Aspect CLI to remain free for individuals (only for personal use), Small Business (fewer than 50 employees), and non-profit or academic institutions. Please contact Aspect at https://aspect.build if you would like to use the Aspect CLI and fall outside of free use.
Aspect CLI OSS
Aspect CLI is built on top of Aspect CLI OSS, the open-source, open-core portion of the Aspect CLI found at https://github.com/aspect-build/aspect-cli. Aspect CLI is Apache 2 licensed. The parts of the Aspect CLI that are not open source in the Aspect CLI OSS repository are closed source.
Installation
Homebrew (MacOS)
To install the Aspect CLI on MacOS, you can run
% brew install aspect-build/aspect/aspect
This installs the aspect command and also links it to bazel, just like the Bazelisk installer does.
Bazelisk (MacOS / Linux)
Aspect CLI can be installed in an existing Bazel workspace using Bazelisk.
This approach doesn't provide the aspect init command, which has to run outside a Bazel workspace.
From the releases page,
copy the .bazeliskrc snippet into your .bazeliskrc file to install Aspect CLI for all developers in the target repository.
The underlying version of Bazel can be configured in your .bazelversion file or the BAZEL_VERSION environment variable.
Manual (MacOS / Linux)
On MacOS and Linux, you can download the aspect binary for your platform and add it to your PATH manually.
For each version of the Aspect CLI, binaries and their SHA256 checksums can be downloaded from the following URL:
https://static.aspect.build/aspect/<version>/aspect-<os>_<arch>
https://static.aspect.build/aspect/<version>/aspect-<os>_<arch>.sha256
where os is one of darwin or linux and arch is one of amd64 or arm64.
Note, if you manually install for MacOS, you can bypass the "Unknown Developer" dialog by running
xattr -c $(which aspect) before launching aspect.
Windows
Windows releases are coming soon.
Usage
Just run aspect help to see the available commands.
Some are the standard ones you know from Bazel, and others are new, such as print and docs.
Write a plugin
Aspect's plugin system allows you to fit Bazel into your team's development process, with custom commands, behaviors, and integrations.
A plugin is any program (written in any language) that serves our gRPC protocol. The easiest way to get started is to clone our starter template repository.
See the Plugin Documentation for more information on how to write a plugin.
Need help or having issues?
If you think you've hit a bug please file a Bug Report.
You can also find us on Bazel Slack on the #aspect-dev channel.
For Enterprise
Aspect CLI is built by Aspect.
See our website at http://aspect.build to learn more about our product offerings.