bduffany / buildbuddy-nodejs-example

Bazel / Node.js / React / TypeScript / BuildBuddy template

This repository serves as a starter project for a Node.js / React / TypeScript app built with Bazel and BuildBuddy.

Technologies used

• Bazel: Build system built and maintained by Google that enables fast and correct builds

• BuildBuddy: Makes Bazel even faster and more useful:

  • Allows cached artifacts to be shared across developer machines (remote Bazel cache)
  • Enables massively parallel remote build execution, by running build actions in the cloud instead of locally
  • Provides a Web UI to view and share your build logs, details, timing profile, and much more.
  • Automatically runs Bazel tests and reports the results to GitHub, so that branches can only be merged if tests pass.

• rules_nodejs: Bazel rules for frontend projects.

• TypeScript: A language that extends JavaScript with types.

• React: A popular frontend framework for building modern Web apps.

• nodejs: Allows building server-side apps with JavaScript. In this example, the backend is also written in TypeScript.

• swc: Used to transpile TypeScript to JavaScript. By default, the ts_project rule will use tsc to transpile TS to JS, but this project includes a macro in //:defs.bzl to use SWC instead. SWC is much faster than tsc but does not do type checking. Instead, type checking happens when running bazel test //..., via auto-generated _typecheck_test rules. See https://blog.aspect.dev/typescript-speedup

• esbuild: Used to bundle and minify the resulting JS.

How to use this template

Make sure you have git and bazel installed. Then:

1. Make a copy of this repo (with git clone)

2. Push your repo to GitHub (using your account or GitHub org).

3. Set up BuildBuddy CI, so that BuildBuddy runs all tests on each push or pull request commit: https://app.buildbuddy.io/workflows/

4. Highly recommended: set up branch protection rules to prevent code from being merged if it doesn't pass all tests.

Running the server locally

Run yarn dev and then visit http://localhost:8082. If you make changes to the app, the app will automatically be re-built, and any open pages will be reloaded in the browser. This is done using ibazel.

Running tests

Run bazel test //... to run tests.