EXTERNAL_DEPS.md

Choosing tarballs

Where the dependency maintainer provides a tarball, prefer that over the automatically generated Github tarball. Github generated tarball SHA256 values can change when Github change their tar/gzip libraries breaking builds. Maintainer provided tarballs are more stable and the maintainer can provide the SHA256.

Adding external dependencies to Envoy (native Bazel)

This is the preferred style of adding dependencies that use Bazel for their build process.

1. Define a new Bazel repository in bazel/repositories.bzl, in the envoy_dependencies() function.
2. Reference your new external dependency in some envoy_cc_library via the external_deps attribute.
3. bazel test //test/...

Adding external dependencies to Envoy (external CMake)

This is the preferred style of adding dependencies that use CMake for their build system.

1. Define a the source Bazel repository in bazel/repositories.bzl, in the envoy_dependencies() function.
2. Add a cmake_external rule to bazel/foreign_cc/BUILD. This will reference the source repository in step 1.
3. Reference your new external dependency in some envoy_cc_library via the name bound in step 1 external_deps attribute.
4. bazel test //test/...

Adding external dependencies to Envoy (genrule repository)

This is the newer style of adding dependencies with no upstream Bazel configs. It wraps the dependency's native build tooling in a Bazel-aware shell script, installing to a Bazel-managed prefix.

The shell script is executed by Bash, with a few Bazel-specific extensions. See the Bazel docs for "genrule" for details on Bazel's shell extensions.

1. Add a BUILD file in bazel/external/, using a genrule target to build the dependency. Please do not add BUILD logic that replaces the dependency's upstream build tooling.
2. Define a new Bazel repository in bazel/repositories.bzl, in the envoy_dependencies() function. The repository may use genrule_repository from bazel/genrule_repository.bzl to place large genrule shell commands into a separate file.
3. Reference your new external dependency in some envoy_cc_library via Y in the external_deps attribute.
4. bazel test //test/...

Dependencies between external libraries can use the standard Bazel dependency resolution logic, using the $(location) shell extension to resolve paths to binaries, libraries, headers, etc.

Updating an external dependency version

1. Update the corresponding entry in the repository locations file.
2. bazel test //test/...

Overriding an external dependency temporarily

An external dependency built by genrule repository or native Bazel could be overridden by specifying Bazel option --override_repository to point to a local copy. The option can used multiple times to override multiple dependencies. The name of the dependency can be found in the repository locations file. The path of the local copy has to be absolute path.

Distdir - prefetching dependencies

Usually Bazel downloads all dependencies during build time. But there is a possibility to prefetch dependencies and point Bazel to them by using --distdir option and providing a path to directory which contains tarballs with exactly the same name and the same SHA256 sum that are defined in repositories definitions.

For example, let's assume that your distdir location is $HOME/envoy_distdir. To prefetch boringssl which is defined in bazel/repository_locations.bzl as:

boringssl = dict(
    # Use commits from branch "chromium-stable-with-bazel"
    sha256 = "d1700e0455f5f918f8a85ff3ce6cd684d05c766200ba6bdb18c77d5dcadc05a1",
    strip_prefix = "boringssl-060e9a583976e73d1ea8b2bfe8b9cab33c62fa17",
    # chromium-70.0.3538.67
    urls = ["https://github.com/google/boringssl/archive/060e9a583976e73d1ea8b2bfe8b9cab33c62fa17.tar.gz"],
),

$HOME/envoy_distdir needs to contain 060e9a583976e73d1ea8b2bfe8b9cab33c62fa17.tar.gz file.

Then Envoy needs to be built with the following command:

bazel build --distdir=$HOME/envoy_distdir //source/exe:envoy