Important

Maintenance Mode Notice
This repository contains the legacy Go implementation of the Aspect CLI and is now in maintenance mode. It has been superseded by a new Rust-based version available at https://github.com/aspect-build/aspect-cli.

Aspect CLI (aspect) is wrapper for Bazel, built on top of Bazelisk, that adds additional features and extensibility to the popular polyglot build system from Google.

Why Aspect CLI?

Every organization has a different engineering culture and developer stack. Bazel was designed for Google's workflows, not yours. Many companies have found they have to write a wrapper around Bazel. This starts out as a small need to shim something in the developer workflow, and is often an untested Bash script living in /tools/bazel which Bazelisk understands as a wrapper script.

Over time, the wrapper accumulates more code, and is a constant source of developer distress.

Licenses

Aspect CLI is Apache 2 licensed.

Installation

Aspect CLI

Bazelisk (MacOS / Linux / Windows)

Aspect CLI can be installed in an existing Bazel workspace using Bazelisk.

Note

This approach doesn't provide the aspect init command, which has to run outside a Bazel workspace.

From the OSS releases page, copy the .bazeliskrc snippet into your .bazeliskrc file to install Aspect CLI for all developers in the target repository.

The underlying version of Bazel can be configured in your .bazelversion file or the BAZEL_VERSION environment variable.

Homebrew (MacOS)

To install the Aspect CLI on MacOS, you can run

brew install aspect-build/aspect/aspect-legacy

This installs the aspect command and also links it to bazel, just like the Bazelisk installer does.

Manual (MacOS / Linux / Windows)

On MacOS and Linux, you can download the Aspect CLI aspect binary for your platform on our Releases page and add it to your PATH manually.

Note, if you manually install for MacOS, you can bypass the "Unknown Developer" dialog by running xattr -c $(which aspect) before launching aspect.

Usage

Just run aspect help to see the available commands. Some are the standard ones you know from Bazel, and others are new, such as print and docs.

Need help or having issues?

If you think you've hit a bug please file a Bug Report.

You can also find us on Bazel Slack on the #aspect-build channel.

For Enterprise

Aspect CLI is built by Aspect.

See our website at http://aspect.build to learn more about our product offerings.