Installing Bazel on Windows

Prerequisites

• 64 bit Windows 7 or newer, or 64 bit Windows Server 2008 R2 or newer

• MSYS2 shell

• Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015

  These are common DLLs that Bazel needs. You may already have them installed.

Getting Bazel

1. Download Bazel for Windows from GitHub.

   Look for bazel-<version>-windows-x86_64.exe, for example bazel-0.16.1-windows-x86_64.exe.

   Tip: Rename the binary to bazel.exe and move it to a directory on your %PATH% (for example to c:\bazel), so you can run Bazel by typing bazel in any directory.

2. Edit environment variables.

   Open the “Environment Variables” dialog box from Control Panel or Start Menu, and add or edit the following variables under the “User variables” section:

   1. Edit Path. Add new entries to the beginning of the list:
      • The directory of bazel.exe. (Example: c:\bazel).
      • The usr\bin directory of MSYS2. (Example: c:\msys64\usr\bin).
      • If you will build Python code: the directory of python.exe. (Example: c:\python3).
   2. Add BAZEL_SH. Its value must be the path to MSYS2 Bash. Example: c:\msys64\usr\bin\bash.exe
   3. Add JAVA_HOME (if you will build Java code). Its value must be the directory where you installed the Java JDK 8, for example C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_152

   None of these paths should contain spaces or non-ASCII characters.

Other ways to get Bazel

• Install Bazel using the Chocolatey package manager
• Compile Bazel from source

Install using Chocolatey

1. Install the Chocolatey package manager

2. Install the Bazel package:

   choco install bazel
   

   This command will install the latest available version of Bazel and its dependencies, such as the MSYS2 shell. This will not install Visual C++ though.

See Chocolatey installation and package maintenance guide for more information about the Chocolatey package.