I’ve been working today on migrating a SBT project to Bazel. I’ve taken a few wrong turns, and I’ll document them later, but this will be my working doc and I’ll add some failures to the end.

Two major components – Bazel’s generate_workspace tool, and SBT’s make-pom command. You’ll create a POM file with the dependencies and repos.

ted:growth$ sbt make-pom
[warn] Executing in batch mode.
[warn] For better performance, hit [ENTER] to switch to interactive mode, or
[warn] consider launching sbt without any commands, or explicitly passing 'shell'
[info] Loading project definition from /Users/ted/dev/growth/project
SLF4J: Failed to load class "org.slf4j.impl.StaticLoggerBinder".
SLF4J: Defaulting to no-operation (NOP) logger implementation
SLF4J: See http://www.slf4j.org/codes.html#StaticLoggerBinder for further details.
[info] Set current project to growth (in build file:/Users/ted/dev/growth/)
[warn] Multiple resolvers having different access mechanism configured with same name 'Artifactory-lib'. To avoid conflict, Remove duplicate project resolvers (`resolvers`) or rename publishing resolver (`publishTo`).
[info] Wrote /Users/ted/dev/growth/target/scala-2.11/growth_2.11-resurrector-9449dfb1de3b816c5fd74c4948f16496b38952ab.pom
[success] Total time: 5 s, completed Jun 14, 2017 4:00:17 PM

This generates a pom file, but not exactly as generate_workspace wants it. It requires a directory with a pom.xml, so go ahead and turn that into one by making a tempdir and copying the file to it TMPDIR="$(mktemp -d)"; cp /Users/ted/dev/growth/target/scala-2.11/growth_2.11-resurrector-9449dfb1de3b816c5fd74c4948f16496b38952ab.pom "${TMPDIR}/pom.xml"

Next, build

So, on to the failures:
I initially tried to do my own workspace code generation. I took the output of sbt libraryDependencies and turned it into mvn_jar stanzas via script. This didn’t work, for the simple reason that I wasn’t doing it transitively, they mention that in the generate_workspace docs. I also tried specifying that list of deps as a big list of –archive stanzas; That turned out to be a mistake, mostly because of alternate repos. I also had to clean out a broken SBT set of repos; bazel does not play well with repeated repo definitions, while SBT is happy to ignore them.