Outline - Aspect Build docs

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Sponsorship for development of this training course was provided by Zipline. Thank you!

The JavaScript ecosystem moves quickly. New tools pop up monthly, and many of them evolve to be build systems, either intentionally or accidentally. The Aspect team has been developing Bazel support for JavaScript since 2017. As the industry experts we’re excited to show you how well this tooling can work for your team.

We’ll use the following Bazel modules:

https://registry.bazel.build/modules/rules_nodejs supplies a fully-hermetic Node.js toolchain, both for running build tools and for server application runtimes.
https://registry.bazel.build/modules/aspect_rules_js adds PNPM package manager support, and includes basic rules for building, testing, and running JavaScript code.
https://registry.bazel.build/modules/aspect_rules_ts is the TypeScript module. It adds type-checking and transpilation to JavaScript.

Bazel can work with pretty much any JavaScript tooling. However it’s fastest with tools that don’t have a long “cold-start”, so we’ll demonstrate usage with Rust-based and Go-based tooling, including:

typescript-go for type-checking (coming soon)
esbuild for bundling
swc for transpilation
Vite for devserver

Finally, let’s make our terminal experience great. The Aspect CLI makes Bazel much easier to use, with a task runner layer similar to package.json scripts. Before starting the course, we assume you’ve already taken Bazel 101. With that, let’s get started.