Bazel Migration using Fully Ephemeral BUILD Files

Abstract

We present Luminar’s Bazel migration strategy from a custom build system based on the C++ package manager Conan. Our focus is on leveraging the tool Gazelle for automatic build file generation which enables us to have fully ephemeral BUILD files not tracked in version control. Additionally, we use the Nix package manager for seamless inclusion of third-party dependencies that are not trivial to compile with Bazel.