Customize Bazel with Aspect CLI plugins
Blog post from Aspect Build
Bazel, a build and test tool popularized by Google, presents challenges in understanding and integration for developers and DevInfra teams, but its customization capabilities offer significant benefits. The aspect CLI acts as an enhanced wrapper around Bazel, incorporating bazelisk and supporting plugins that address local developer workflow issues, such as customizing error messages, deploying, linting, and applying auto-fixes. These plugins can be utilized on Continuous Integration servers to streamline processes like reporting build failures and managing flakiness. The article introduces how to write a plugin using a template repository and Hashicorp's go-plugin library, with a focus on a sample plugin, HelloWorldPlugin, which demonstrates basic command integration and event handling. Additionally, the fix-visibility plugin exemplifies a practical application by addressing common visibility errors in Bazel, offering auto-fix suggestions interactively, and reducing the support burden on DevInfra teams. The article encourages the development of more plugins to enhance Bazel's usability and plans to create a plugin gallery for broader discovery and adoption.