how to find and deploy the correct files with Bazel's pkg_tar() in Windows?

Question

please take a look at the bin-win target in my repository here: https://github.com/thinlizzy/bazelexample/blob/master/demo/BUILD#L28

it seems to be properly packing the executable inside a file named bin-win.tar.gz, but I still have some questions:

1- in my machine, the file is being generated at this directory:

C:\Users\John\AppData\Local\Temp_bazel_John\aS4O8v3V\execroot__main__\bazel-out\x64_windows-fastbuild\bin\demo

which makes finding the tar.gz file a cumbersome task. The question is how can I make my bin-win target to move the file from there to a "better location"? (perhaps defined by an environment variable or a cmd line parameter/flag)

2- how can I include more files with my executable? My actual use case is I want to supply data files and some DLLs together with the executable. Should I use a filegroup() rule and refer its name in the "srcs" attribute as well?

2a- for the DLLs, is there a way to make a filegroup() rule to interpret environment variables? (e.g: the directories of the DLLs)

Thanks!

Answer 1

1. Look for the bazel-bin and bazel-genfiles directories in your workspace. These are actually junctions (directory symlinks) that Bazel updates after every build. If you bazel build //:demo, you can access its output as bazel-bin\demo.

   (a) You can also set TMP and TEMP in your environment to point to e.g. c:\tmp. Bazel will pick those up instead of C:\Users\John\AppData\Local\Temp, so the full path for the output directory (that bazel-bin points to) will be c:\tmp\aS4O8v3V\execroot\__main__\bazel-out\x64_windows-fastbuild\bin.

   (b) Or you can pass the --output_user_root startup flag, e.g. bazel--output_user_root=c:\tmp build //:demo. That will have the same effect as (a).

   There's currently no way to get rid of the _bazel_John\aS4O8v3V\execroot part of the path.

2. Yes, I think you need to put those files in pkg_tar.srcs. Whether you use a filegroup() rule is irrelevant; filegroup just lets you group files together, so you can refer to the group by name, which is useful when you need to refer to the same files in multiple rules.

   2.a. I don't think so.