How to Prepare Bazel Distribution Directory

This document describes the steps to prepare Bazel distribution directory for Apollo.

Introduction

According to Bazel Docs: Running Bazel in an airgapped environment, Bazel’s implicit dependencies are fetched over the network while running for the first time. However, this may cause problems when running Bazel in an airgapped environment or with unstable Internet access, even if you have vendored all of your WORKSPACE dependencies.

To solve that, the Apollo team decided to provide these dependencies for every Bazel binary version used in Apollo. Please do remember to do this once for every new Bazel binary version, since the implicit dependencies can be different for every Bazel release.

The section below describes the steps to prepare distribution directory using Apollo-provided tarballs.

Prepare Distribution Directory using Apollo-provided tarballs

1. Check Bazel version used by Apollo by running bazel version from inside Apollo container.

$ bazel version
Build label: 3.5.0
Build target: bazel-out/aarch64-opt/bin/src/main/java/com/google/devtools/build/lib/bazel/BazelServer_deploy.jar
Build time: Wed Sep 2 21:11:43 2020 (1599081103)
Build timestamp: 1599081103
Build timestamp as int: 1599081103

Here the Bazel version used is 3.5.0. In the sections below, we will refer to it as BAZEL_VERSION.

2. Download corresponding bazel-dependencies tarball by running:

wget https://apollo-system.cdn.bcebos.com/archive/bazel_deps/bazel-dependencies-${BAZEL_VERSION}.tar.gz

3. Uncompress the tarball and move the dependencies into the distribution directory defined by the ${APOLLO_BAZEL_DIST_DIR} environment variable:

tar xzf bazel-dependencies-${BAZEL_VERSION}.tar.gz
source ${APOLLO_ROOT_DIR}/cyber/setup.bash
mv bazel-dependencies-${BAZEL_VERSION}/* "${APOLLO_BAZEL_DIST_DIR}"

In case that bazel-dependencies for the Bazel version you used were not provided by the Apollo team, you can build it on your own following the recipe below.

Recipe to build Bazel's implicit dependencies

The following is the recipe to produce Bazel's implicit dependencies:

# Checkout Bazel-${BAZEL_VERSION} branch
git clone --depth=1 -b "${BAZEL_VERSION}" https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel bazel.git

cd bazel.git

# Build Bazel's implicit dependencies for that Bazel version
bazel build @additional_distfiles//:archives.tar

# Make sure ${APOLLO_BAZEL_DIST_DIR} is defined
source ${APOLLO_ROOT_DIR}/cyber/setup.bash

# Uncompress the tarball to the distribution directory for Apollo
tar xvf bazel-bin/external/additional_distfiles/archives.tar \
  -C "${APOLLO_BAZEL_DIST_DIR}" --strip-components=3