Bazel plugin for Visual Studio Code

This extension provides support for Bazel in Visual Studio.

Features

• Syntax highlighting
• Bazel Targets tree displays the build packages/targets in your workspace
• CodeLens links in BUILD files to directly launch a build or test by simply clicking on the targets
• Buildifier integration to lint and format your Bazel files (requires that Buildifier be installed)
• Bazel Task definitions for tasks.json
• Coverage Support showing coverage results from bazel coverage directly in VS Code.
• Debug Starlark code in your .bzl files during a build (set breakpoints, step through code, inspect variables, etc.)

Configuring the Extension

This extension adds a Bazel section to the extension settings in Visual Studio Code. If you have Bazel installed in a location that is not on your system path or if you wish to use a different version in the IDE, you should set the Bazel: Executable setting to the location of the Bazel executable.

Similarly, the Bazel: Buildifier Executable setting can be configured if you install Buildifier in a location that is not on your system path.

When Buildifier is installed, the Format Document command in Visual Studio code will reformat BUILD, WORKSPACE, .bzl, and .sky files using the tool and will display lint warnings from those files as you type. By default, this extension does not automatically fix lint warnings during formatting, but you can opt into this by enabling the Bazel: Buildifier Fix on Format setting.

Using a separate output base

By default this extension will use the default output base for running queries. This will cause builds to block queries, potentially causing degraded performance. In Bazel versions since 7.1 it is safe to disable this by changing the bazel.queriesShareServer setting to false. In earlier versions it can be safely disabled after adding the convenience symlinks to .bazelignore, for example:

bazel-myreponame
bazel-bin
bazel-testlogs

See #216 and bazelbuild/bazel#106539.

Using the Starlark Debugger

Currently, the Starlark Debugger can be used by right-clicking a build target in the Bazel Build Targets view and selecting "Build Target with Starlark Debugger". This will start the build inside the Visual Studio Code debugger (output will be redirected to the Debug Console pane) and it will pause on any breakpoints hit during execution.

When a Bazel thread is paused, you can step through Starlark code, add watch expressions, and execute arbitrary statements by typing them in the input area of the Debug Console.

Clicking the "Stop" button in the debugger will kill the Bazel process being debugger, allowing you to halt the current build. The Bazel server, however, will continue running.

Using a language server (experimental)

This extension can use a language server for various features, such as go to definition and completions. There are currently two compatible language servers:

• bazel-lsp is based on Facebook's Starlark language server and extends it with additional, Bazel-specific functionality.
• starpls is an implementation based on rust-analyzer which also provides Bazel-specific functionality.

In general, you need to install the language server binary and then set the bazel.lsp.command setting. See the README of the corresponding repo for more specific setup instructions.

We can't currently make any recommendation between these two. Both are under active development and are rapidly gaining more functionality.

Bazel tasks

Bazel tasks can be configured from the tasks.json using the following structure:

{
  // See https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=733558
  // for the documentation about the tasks.json format
  "version": "2.0.0",
  "tasks": [
    {
      "label": "Check for flakyness",
      "type": "bazel",
      "command": "test",
      "targets": ["${input:pickFlakyTest}"],
      "options": ["--runs_per_test=9"],
    },
  ],
  "inputs": [
    {
      "id": "pickFlakyTest",
      "type": "command",
      "command": "bazel.pickTarget",
      "args": {
        "query": "kind('.*_test', //...:*)",
        "placeHolder": "Which test to check for flakyness?",
      },
    },
  ],
}

Coverage support (Experimental)

For all coverage tasks, the coverage results are automatically loaded into VS Code upon completion of the task. E.g., you could define your own task to display the coverage provided by your integration tests using the following task definition:

{
  "label": "Show test coverage from integration test",
  "type": "bazel",
  "command": "coverage",
  "targets": ["//test/integration/...", "//cpp/test/integration/..."],
  "options": ["--instrumentation_filter=.*"],
}

You might need additional Bazel options to get the intended coverage results. In particular if are using remote builds, you might need to use the --experimental_split_coverage_postprocessing and --experimental_fetch_all_coverage_outputs options. See the documentation on Code Coverage with Bazel for more details.

Code coverage support in this extension is still rather fresh and might still have rough edges. It was tested with the Java, C++, Go and Rust rules. In case you are using the code coverage integration with any other language (Python, Swift, Kotlin, Scala, ...), please let us know how things are going in bazelbuild/vscode-bazel#367. Please share both positive and negative experiences you might have.

For C++ and Rust, make sure to have c++filt / rustfilt installed and available through the $PATH. Otherwise, only mangled, hard-to-decipher function names will be displayed. For Java, no additional steps are required.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to the Bazel Visual Studio extension, please refer to the contribution guidelines for information about our patch acceptance process and setting up your development environment.