Building Android Apps with Bazel

Building Android Apps with Bazel

Bazel is an open-source build and test tool similar to Make, Maven, and Gradle. The Google-internal version of Bazel, Blaze, is used to build major apps such as Google Maps and YouTube. Bazel uses a human-readable, high-level build language that supports multiple languages and platforms. There is virtually no limit on the size of the codebase or the number of uses that Bazel supports. See the product roadmap to learn about the path toward a stable 1.0 release.

Note that Bazel is currently in Beta - it is not yet covered by a deprecation policy, may be subject to backward-incompatible changes, and may be missing some features.

Why should I use Bazel?

• High-level build language. Bazel uses an abstract, human-readable language to describe the build properties of your project at a high semantical level. Unlike other tools, Bazel is declarative. Rather than defining individual build steps for your project, your tell Bazel about your project and it creates the build actions behind the scenes. This shields you from the complexity of writing individual calls to tools such as compilers and linkers.
• Bazel is fast and reliable. Bazel caches all previously done work and tracks changes to both file content and build commands. This way, Bazel knows when something needs to be rebuilt, and rebuilds only that. To further speed up your builds, you can set up your project to build in a highly parallel and incremental fashion.

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