This post will cover two things: How to run an arbitrary tool with Bazel (in this case, PlantUML, a tool to generate diagrams), by writing a rule set How to test this rule set. It should be mentioned that while I was working on this rule set, it became more and more apparent PlantUML is not a great candidate for this kind of integration, as its output is platform-dependent (the font rendering).

This post will describe how to compile a small application written in Kotlin using Bazel, tests, as well as how to use static analyzers. Phosphorus Phosphorus is the application that this post will cover. It’s a small utility that I wrote to check if an image matches a reference. If it doesn’t, Phosphorus generates an image highlighting the differences. The goal is to be able to check that something generates an image in a given way, and doesn’t change - at least if it’s not expected.

In this post, we’ll cover what Bazel is, how to use it, and why I chose to use it. What is Bazel? Bazel is a build-system released by Google in 2015. It actually is derived from the internal build-system Google uses internally for most of its own code-base, called Blaze. Building at scale Bazel has a huge focus on hermetic builds, and reproducibility. Every build step is, from a really broad perspective, defined as a list of inputs, tools, and outputs.

This blog has been inactive for a long time. I tried to at least post an article yearly, and next thing you know, two years and a half fly by… Halloween seemed like a good time to resurrect it. I wanted to start writing again recently, and faced an issue: this blog was using Octopress 2. Well, Octopress has apparently been dead for even longer than this blog. So I wanted to switch to another static generator.