Rules

Recommended rules

Much of Bazel’s strength comes from the ability to define new rules which can be used by others. There is a growing and evolving set of rules to support popular languages and packages.

Contact the respective rule set’s maintainers regarding issues and feature requests. To find more Bazel rules, use a search engine or look on GitHub.

Here is a selection of recommended rules:

Android
Boost
C / C++
Docker
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript / NodeJS
Kubernetes
Maven dependency management
Objective C
Package building and fetching rules
Protocol Buffers
Python
Scala
Shell
Webtesting (Webdriver)

The repository Skylib contains additional functions that can be useful when writing new rules and new macros.

Native rules that do not apply to a specific programming language

Native rules are shipped with the Bazel binary, they are always available in BUILD files without a load statement.

Extra actions
- extra_action
- action_listener
General
Platform
Workspace

Embedded non-native rules

Bazel also embeds additional rules written in Starlark. Those can be loaded from the @bazel_tools built-in external repository.

Repository rules