Running bazel server in docker container

[sonicxml]

I would like to spin up a docker container that runs a long-running bazel server with the purpose of being able to send bazel build commands to it (similar to a remote build server) from my machine or another container. What is the best / recommended way to do this?

I saw the bazel docker sandbox doc page but it looks like it hasn't been updated in a while -- even the bazel-toolchains repo it links to doesn't have a sample .bazelrc past 4.1.0. Is this still recommended?

I also tried playing around with the bazel docker container but it looks like it's set up to be both client and server and not just run a server and listen for commands.

Any guidance would be appreciated, thanks!

[veith4f]

Great question. I am still relatively new to bazel but definitely wonder if in the heavily containerized world we have today there is still so much sense for platform-specific toolchains and rule implementations that ship different binaries for different platforms.

I just took over maintenance for a large bazel build env that going forward should be usable on different build machines comprising windows, linux and macos/amd64, macos/arm.

Quite frankly, I think it is kind of ridiculous to implement treatments for all these different platforms. Bazel should run in a container where the respective bazel version is installed and bazel rules should make heavy use of bash and other gnu tools that the container provides.

There should be a bash rule that allows running bash scripts and a large lib of rules that build on that bash rule to implement stuff like base64-encode/decode, yq, jq, sed, and all these other targets that sort of naturally suggest themselves.

I really wonder why that doesn't exist yet. Wouldn't it make much more sense to use bazel that way?

[veith4f]

Proposal: #26891