bazville

Overview

Bazville offers several Bazel build rules that Bazel doesn't provide natively.

• Java web application
• Run web application with Tomcat
• Jar and war

Installation

The latest version of bazville is 0.0.2. Therefore to include bazville, add following to your WORKSPACE file.

load("@bazel_tools//tools/build_defs/repo:http.bzl", "http_archive")
http_archive(
    name = "bazville",
    sha256 = "902e1fee3d2cf2b1df479b486545c859d9ad3edecc0895559ca49bc58b10c9ad",
    strip_prefix = "bazville-v_0_0_2",
    urls = ["https://github.com/jiaqi/bazville/archive/v_0_0_2.zip"],
)

Web application and Tomcat

The primary reason of Bazville is to build Java web application with static content from other build rules, and run it with Bazel. For example in the BUILD file,

load("@bazville//tools/java:webapp.bzl", "webapp")

webapp(
    name = "webapp",
    srcs = glob(["WEB-INF/**"]) + [
        ":favicon.png",
        "//other/static:file",
        "//some/npm:packages",
    ],
    deps = [":serverlib"],
)

The build target above creates a web application directory that can run with the following tomcat build target.

load("@bazville//tools/tomcat:tomcat.bzl", "tomcat_binary")
tomcat_binary(
    name = "tomcat_server",
    app_dir = ":webapp",
    tomcat_bundle = "@bazville//tools/tomcat:tomcat_9",
)

Now you can run the web application with tomcat in bazel.

bazel run myapp:tomcat_server

For more details, checkout Java web application and Tomcat pages.

Refer to angular-on-java project for a full example.

Context

The official support of Java web application in Bazel is bazelbuild/rules_appengine, which comes with a number of problems as discussed in a blog post. After some wrestling I realized I can not manage to have appengine rule accurately serve my needs. Since there doesn't seem to be another option, I decided to go ahead and create one.

With bazville I was able to change the demo project jiaqi/angular-on-java to build web application correctly without assuming it runs in appengine, and run it with Tomcat in bazel. This page compares bazville with rules_appengine.