Bazel: Is there a way to see progress without always rewriting the lines with curses

[titan73]

When running the build on the farm with several processors in interactive I get something like:

Extracting Bazel installation...
Starting local Bazel server (9.1.1) and connecting to it...
INFO: Invocation ID: 770608c9-282f-4cf0-8d42-adf8cb4cf129
Computing main repo mapping: 
Computing main repo mapping: 
Computing main repo mapping: 
Computing main repo mapping: 
Computing main repo mapping: 

We don't see what bazel is doing.
Using --curses=no gives the same result.
Using --curses=no --show_progress=false there is almost nothing printed.

Is there a way to have progress without always rewriting lines?

[MLuc24]

--curses=no did work — it stopped the rewriting. What you lost along with it is the update rate, and that is why it feels like nothing happens.

The two flags are coupled. From the user manual, on --progress_report_interval:

When bazel is using cursor control, as specified by --curses, progress is reported every second.

Without cursor control you fall back to the interval, whose default of 0 is not "off" but an escalating schedule: the first report after 10 seconds, then 30, then once a minute. So switching curses off quietly took you from one update per second to one per minute, which on a farm build looks like a hang.

Set it explicitly and you get plain scrolling output at a useful cadence:

bazel build --curses=no --progress_report_interval=1 //...

A couple of seconds is usually nicer than one on a shared machine, since the log stays readable.

Worth saving you a detour: --show_task_finish sounds exactly like what you want and Bazel still accepts it, but it does nothing. Its implementation was removed years ago and the flag was left behind as a no-op — see bazelbuild/bazel#12133 and the later #14052. You would have concluded your setup was broken rather than the flag.

If you want to see the actual work rather than a summary line, --subcommands (or -s) prints the full command line for each action before it runs, in copy-pasteable form. It is verbose, but it is the honest answer to "what is bazel doing".

One thing in your paste worth separating from the output question, though. Those repeated Computing main repo mapping: lines with nothing after them are the periodic report re-printing a state that has not changed — you are still in module and repository resolution, before the build graph exists at all. Raising the interval will get you that same line more often rather than more information. If that phase is where the time is going on the farm, the thing to look at is external repository fetching and network access from those nodes, not the UI flags.

[maliberty]

I don't think there is anything here for OR to do. This is just a bazel question.