Bazville offers several Bazel build rules that Bazel doesn't provide natively.
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"],
)
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.
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.