Contributing to Bazel
How can I help?
There are many ways to help the Bazel project and ecosystem.
- Provide feedback as you use Bazel. As you use it, you may find things
that can be improved. Please report them:
- Report bugs. In particular, it’s important to report any crash or correctness bug.
- Report issues when the documentation is incomplete or unclear.
- Report issues when an error message could be improved.
- As you get experienced with Bazel, engage with the community:
- Answer questions on Stack Overflow.
- Help other users on Slack.
- Improve the documentation or contribute examples.
- Share your experience or your tips, for example on a blog or social media.
- Contribute to the Bazel ecosystem:
- Help rules maintainers by contributing pull requests.
- Create new rules and open-source them.
- Contribute to Bazel-related tools, for example migration tools.
- Improve Bazel integration with other IDEs and tools.
How can I contribute to Bazel source code?
Bazel is a large project and making a significant change to Bazel source code can be difficult. Please check with us on the dev list or on a GitHub issue before investing a lot of time in a patch.
In general, we prefer contributions that fix bugs or add features (as opposed to stylistic, refactoring, or “cleanup” changes). When making a change, please include tests and documentation, and keep in mind backward-compatibility, portability, as well as the impact on memory usage and performance.
See getting started for learning how to work on the code base, and the patch acceptance process for sending your contribution.