Integrating Bazel with IDEs

This page covers how to integrate Bazel with IDEs, such as IntelliJ, Android Studio, and CLion (or build your own IDE plugin). It also includes links to installation and plugin details.

IDEs integrate with Bazel in a variety of ways, from features that allow Bazel executions from within the IDE, to awareness of Bazel structures such as syntax highlighting of the BUILD files.

If you are interested in developing an editor or IDE plugin for Bazel, please join the #ide channel on the Bazel Slack or email the bazel-dev mailing list.

IDEs and editors

IntelliJ, Android Studio and CLion

Official plugin for IntelliJ, Android Studio, and CLion. The plugin is open source.

This is the open source version of the plugin used internally at Google.

Features:

• Interop with language-specific plugins. Supported languages include Java, Scala, and Python.
• Import BUILD files into the IDE with semantic awareness of Bazel targets.
• Make your IDE aware of Starlark, the language used for Bazel’s BUILD and .bzlfiles
• Build, test, and execute binaries directly from the IDE
• Create configurations for debugging and running binaries.

To install, go to the IDE’s plugin browser and search for Bazel.

To manually install older versions, download the zip files from JetBrains’ Plugin Repository and install the zip file from the IDE’s plugin browser:

• Android Studio plugin
• IntelliJ plugin
• CLion plugin

Xcode

Tulsi and XCHammer generate Xcode projects from Bazel BUILD files.

Visual Studio Code

Official plugin for VS Code.

Features:

• Bazel Build Targets tree
• Starlark debugger for .bzl files during a build (set breakpoints, step through code, inspect variables, and so on)

Find the plugin on the Visual Studio marketplace. The plugin is open source.

Atom

Find the language-bazel package on the Atom package manager.

Vim

See bazelbuild/vim-bazel on GitHub

Emacs

See bazelbuild/bazel-emacs-mode on GitHub

Visual Studio

Lavender is an experimental project for generating Visual Studio projects that use Bazel for building.

Eclipse

Bazel Eclipse Feature is a set of plugins for importing Bazel packages into an Eclipse workspace as Eclipse projects.

Automatically run build and test on file change

Bazel watcher is a tool for building Bazel targets when source files change.

Building your own IDE plugin

Read the IDE support blog post to learn more about the Bazel APIs to use when building an IDE plugin.