bazel-cpp-tools

Generate compile_commands.json databases for C/C++ projects built using Bazel to support IDE-like features, such as IntelliSense, debugging, and code browsing, within Visual Studio Code when using either the official Visual Studio Code C/C++ extension or clangd extension.

This project is a fork of bazel-stack-vscode-cc, removing a dependency on bazel-stack-vscode whilst adding several features to make it easier to use.

Features

Bazel C/C++ Tools: Generate compile_commands.json

This command (bazel-cpp-tools.compileCommands.generate) generates a clangd compile commands database, called compile_commands.json that allows a C/C++ code completion extension to provide IntelliSense for your Bazel C/C++ projects.

To setup, edit your workspace settings (search for bazel-cpp-tools.compileCommands.targets in Preferences: Open Settings (UI)) and configure a list of Bazel labels for the cc_binary or cc_library targets you'd like to be indexed. The tool will then produce a command set for the transitive closure of those top-level targets.

These can be added to your workspace's .vscode/settings.json and (optionally) checked-in to VCS as follows:

{
  "bazel-cpp-tools.compileCommands.targets": [
    "//app/foo:foo_binary",
    "//app/bar:bar_binary",
    "//app/baz:baz_binary",
  ]
}

You can get a list of public labels from your project by running bazel query in a terminal window:

bazel query 'attr(visibility, "//visibility:public", //app/foo:*)'

Replacing //app/foo as appropriate.

This feature was derived from https://github.com/grailbio/bazel-compilation-database.

Building and Installing

This is a standard Visual Studio Code extension and so you will need Node.js installed along with a new enough version of npm, probably 8.x.

npm install
npm run install-vsix

The install-vsix script will build and install the extension in to the current Visual Studio Code editor.