Review of State of the Art Solutions for IDE support and Developer Tooling in Monorepos using Bazel

Many developers complain about lacking IDE when working with Bazel. They might not care about using bazel run to execute tools but want use their tools available on the PATH. Providing tools on the PATH in addition to the ones used by the build system leads to extra effort for the teams maintaining this. In this talk, we review existing solutions available in the Bazel ecosystem: First and foremost, Fabian’s project bazel_env.bzl which allows all developers to share the same tool versions as used in the Bazel build for IDEs and local usage. We demonstrate IDE support for C++ and Python in large monorepos by combining multiple projects such as hedronvision/bazel-compile-commands-extractor to generate a compile_commands.json, hofbi/dev-tools for the compile commands extractor to better scale with large codebases, and clangd to integrate with the IDE. To demonstrate all this, we have open-sourced a demo project at https://github.com/hofbi/bazel-ide. Of particular note is the devcontainer environment, which shows that this workflow requires only git, bazel, and direnv to be installed locally while everything else is provided and managed by the build system.

Nov 10, 2025 12:10 — 12:20