bazel-deps

Generate bazel dependencies transitively for maven artifacts, with scala support.

Usage

Run parseproject on your project yaml file. For instance, this project is setup with:

bazel run //:parse -- generate -r `pwd` -s 3rdparty/workspace.bzl -d dependencies.yaml

We give three arguments: the path to the file we will include in our workspace. The path to the root of our bazel repo. The path to the dependencies file. You can also run with --help.

This will create a tree of BUILD files that match the maven group id, and the artifact id will be a label in a BUILD file. You should not edit these by hand, and instead have a separate directory for any exceptions that you manage along with Replacements.

Then you should add

load("//3rdparty:workspace.bzl", "maven_dependencies")

maven_dependencies()

to your workspace to load the maven dependencies.

Assumptions and usage

This tool will generate one canonical version for every jar in the transitive dependencies of the root dependencies declared. You have three conflict resolution modes currently (which currently apply globally):

• fail: if more than one version is found transitively, fail.
• fixed: for all artifacts explicitly added, use that version, otherwise fail if any other artifact has multiple versions.
• highest: for all artifacts explicitly added, use that version, otherwise take the highest version.

In any case, we add a comment for any duplicates found in the workspace loading file.

To declare dependencies, add items to the dependencies key in your declaration file. The format should be yaml or json. It should have dependencies and it may have replacements and options. Important: only dependencies explicitly named have public visibility, transitive dependencies not listed in the dependencies file have visibility limited to the third party directory.

Dependencies

Dependencies are a map from maven group id to artifact id, with some metadata, such as:

dependencies:
  com.google.guava:
    guava:
      version: "18.0"
      lang: java

Language is always required and may be one of java, scala, scala/unmangled. To control the scala version, see the Options section. A common case are projects with many modules. For instance in the scalding project there are many modules: -core, -date, -args, -db, -avro to name a few. To reduce duplication you can do:

dependencies:
  com.twitter:
    scalding:
      version: 0.16.0
      lang: scala
      modules: [core, date, args, db, arvo]

The version field is optional. If it is absent, it means this jar is expected to be found by transitive dependencies, and it is available to be used outside of the thirdparty directory, but the exact version used can be selected according to the version resolution rules. It is an error to have an unversioned dependency that is not a transitive dependency of another versioned dependency.

A target may optionally add exports and exclude lists to a dependency. exports should be just the group and artifact (such as: com.twitter:scalding-core in the above), and they should be listed in the dependencies. exclude list should also be only the group and artifact.

Each group id can only appear once, so you should collocate dependencies by group. WARNING the parsing library we are using does not fail on duplicate keys, it just takes the last one, so watch out. It would be good to fix that, but writing a new yaml parser is out of scope.

Packaging and Classifiers

Depending on artifacts with classifiers is straightforward: just add the packaging and classifier as part of the artifact id:

dependencies:
  net.sf.json-lib:
    json-lib:jar:jdk15: # artifact:packaging:classifier
      lang: java
      version: "2.4"

Note: Currently, only jar packaging is supported for dependencies. More work is needed on the bazel-deps backend to ensure that non-jar dependencies are written as data attributes, instead of regular jar dependencies.

Excluding artifacts with packaging or classifiers is similar to including dependencies. Non-jar packaging is supported for exclude.

  com.amazonaws:
    DynamoDBLocal:
      lang: java
      version: "1.11.86"
      exclude:
        - "com.almworks.sqlite4java:sqlite4java-win32-x86:dll"
        - "com.almworks.sqlite4java:sqlite4java-win32-x64:dll"
        - "com.almworks.sqlite4java:libsqlite4java-osx:dylib"
        - "com.almworks.sqlite4java:libsqlite4java-linux-i386:so"
        - "com.almworks.sqlite4java:libsqlite4java-linux-amd64:so"

Annotation Processors (processorClasses)

A target may also optionally add processorClasses to a dependency. This is for annotation processors. bazel-deps will generate a java_library and a java_plugin for each annotation processor defined. For example, we can define Google's auto-value annotation processor via:

dependencies:
  com.google.auto.value:
    auto-value:
      version: "1.5"
      lang: java
      processorClasses: ["com.google.auto.value.processor.AutoValueProcessor"]

This will yield the following:

java_library(
    name = "auto_value",
    exported_plugins = [
        ":auto_value_plugin",
    ],
    visibility = [
        "//visibility:public",
    ],
    exports = [
        "//external:jar/com/google/auto/value/auto_value",
    ],
)

java_plugin(
    name = "auto_value_plugin",
    processor_class = "com.google.auto.value.processor.AutoValueProcessor",
    deps = [
        "//external:jar/com/google/auto/value/auto_value",
    ],
)

If there is only a single processorClasses defined, the java_plugin rule is named <java_library_name>_plugin. If there are multiple processorClasses defined, each one is named <java_library_name>_plugin_<processor_class_to_snake_case>.

Options

In the options we set:

• buildHeader: usually you will want to configure your scala support here:

  buildHeader:
    - load("@io_bazel_rules_scala//scala:scala_import.bzl", "scala_import")

• languages: java and scala
• thirdPartyDirectory: path to where we write the BUILD files for thirdparty. The default is 3rdparty/jvm.
• versionConflictPolicy: fixed, fail or highest
• transitivity: runtime_deps or exports
• resolvers: the maven servers to use.
• resolverCache: where bazel-deps should cache resolved packages. local (target/local-repo in the repository root) or bazel_output_base (bazel-deps/local-repo inside the repository's Bazel output base -- from bazel info output_base)
• namePrefix: a string added to the generated workspace names, to avoid conflicts. The external repository names and binding targets of each dependency are prefixed.
• strictVisibility: this is enabled by default, when enabled a target must be explicitly declared in the dependencies.yaml file or it will not be visible to the rest of the workspace. If it is set to false all targets will be generated with public visibility.
• licenses: a set of strings added a licenses rule to each generated bazel target. Required by bazel if your build targets are under third_party/
• resolverType: the string aether or coursier. aether is the default, but it is slower and seems to silently miss some dependencies for reasons we don't yet understand. Coursier will likely be the default in the future, but for now it is opt in.

In the default case, with no options given, we use:

• highest versionConflictPolicy
• exports transitivity
• allow java and scala 2.11
• use maven central as the resolver
• local resolverCache
• empty namePrefix ("")

Replacements

Some maven jars should not be used and instead are replaced by internal targets. Here are some examples of this:

1. A subproject in the repo is published as a maven artifact (A). Others (B) depend on this artifact (B -> A) and in turn we depend on those (we have added B to our dependencies file). We don't want to pull A from a maven repo, since we build it internally, so we replace that artifact with an internal target.
2. We get some scala artifacts directly from the sdk. So, if a jar says it needs org.scala-lang:scala-library we already have that (and a few other jars) declared, and we don't want to risk having two potentially incompatible versions.
3. A small external project has both a bazel build and a maven publishing. We prefer to use the bazel build so we can easily pull more recent versions by bumping up a gitsha rather than waiting for jar to be published.

The replacements work on the level of artifacts. An artifact is replaced one-for-one with a local bazel target. For instance:

replacements:
  org.scala-lang:
    scala-library:
      lang: scala/unmangled # scala-library is not mangled like sbt does with other jars
      target: "@io_bazel_rules_scala_scala_library"
    scala-reflect:
      lang: scala/unmangled
      target: "@io_bazel_rules_scala_scala_reflect"

In this way, we redirect maven deps to those providers.

Note, we stop walking the graph when we see a replaced node, so the replacement target is now responsible for building correctly, and correctly exporting any dependencies that need to be on the compile classpath.

Code

This code was originally forked from pgr0ss/bazel-deps

This code was inspired by the aether examples for walking maven dependencies.