How to use Bazel with GitLab to speed up your builds

Bazel is a powerful tool that enhances build pipelines by integrating with GitLab CI to improve both speed and correctness in software development processes. Unlike traditional methods that rebuild all artifacts from scratch, Bazel optimizes builds by only recompiling necessary components, thus making it faster and more reliable than conventional build scripts like Makefiles. This efficiency is achieved without compromising the accuracy of builds, thanks to Bazel's adept handling of incremental changes and caching. Bazel supports multiple programming languages, including Java, C, C++, Python, and Objective-C, and is continually expanding its capabilities with open-source rule sets for languages like Go and Scala. In GitLab CI, setting up Bazel for builds is straightforward, involving configurations that ensure cache immutability and effective artifact management, although remote caching or execution can further accelerate the process. The tool is also beneficial for testing, allowing teams to run selective incremental tests based on changes, thus optimizing the development cycle. GitLab is exploring further integration of Bazel to enhance its CI/CD capabilities, such as enabling faster builds and tests triggered directly from the Web IDE, and considering distributed builds and caching for autoscaling. Users are encouraged to share their experiences and suggestions to improve Bazel's integration with GitLab CI.

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