Contributing to Bazel

There are many ways to help the Bazel project and ecosystem.

Provide feedback

As you use Bazel, you may find things that can be improved. You can help by reporting issues when:

• Bazel crashes or you encounter a bug that can only be resolved using bazel clean.
• The documentation is incomplete or unclear. You can also report issues from the page you are viewing by using the “Create issue” link at the top right corner of the page.
• An error message could be improved.

Participate in the community

You can engage with the Bazel community by:

• Answering questions on Stack Overflow.
• Helping other users on Slack.
• Improving documentation or contributing examples.
• Sharing your experience or your tips, for example, on a blog or social media.

Contribute code

You can contribute to the Bazel ecosystem by:

• Helping rules maintainers by contributing pull requests.
• Creating new rules and open-sourcing them.
• Contributing to Bazel-related tools, for example, migration tools.
• Improving Bazel integration with other IDEs and tools.

How can I contribute to Bazel source code?

Bazel is a large project and making a change to Bazel source code can be difficult.

Before making a change, create a GitHub issue or email bazel-dev@.

The most helpful contributions fix bugs or add features (as opposed to stylistic, refactoring, or “cleanup” changes). Your change should include tests and documentation, keeping in mind backward-compatibility, portability, and the impact on memory usage and performance.

To learn how to work on the Bazel code base, see getting started. To learn about how to submit a change, see the patch acceptance process.