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DeveloperGuide.md

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Prerequesites

Windows

  • You should use Windows 10 with BuildXL. You do not need to install Visual Studio to get a working build, but it can be very helpful and is recommended for Windows development.
  • You will also need to install the Windows development kit. When you build the repo, the build script will determine if you have a compatible version installed and provide an error message with a link if one needs to be installed
  • Visual Studio 2019 Build Tools build tools must be installed. Scroll down to the "Tools for Visual Studio 2019" section, download and run the installer for "Build Tools for Visual Studio 2019". Within the Visual Studio installer under "Individual Components", search for and install "MSVC (v142) - VS 2019 C++ x64/x86 Spectre-mitigated libs (v14.29-16.10)".

macOS

To run BuildXL on macOS you need to install:

  • Microsoft .NET Core SDK for macOS
  • The latest Mono runtime
  • If you want to run and load the sandbox to enable fully observed and cacheable builds, you also have to turn off System Integrity Protection (SIP) on macOS. SIP blocks the installation of the unsigned kernel extension (or Kext) produced by the build.
  • Latest version of Xcode

Linux

  • You need a Windows machine to build Linux BuildXL binaries. We currently do not support building BuildXL in Linux.
  • A Linux machine or VM need to be setup to perform test.

Performing a build

bxl.cmd (and ./bxl.sh) are the entry points to building BuildXL. They provide some shorthands for common tasks to prevent developers from needing to specify longer command line options. While most examples below are based off of bxl.cmd for Windows, there will most times be a bxl.sh equivalent for macOS.

Minimal Build

From The root of the enlistment run bxl.cmd -minimal. This will:

  1. Download the latest pre-build version of bxl.exe
  2. Use it to pull all package dependencies
  3. Perform a build of the BuildXL repo scoped to just bxl.exe and its required dependencies.
  4. Deploy a runnable bxl.exe to out\bin\debug\win-x64.

Note you do not need administrator (elevated) privileges for your console window.

Build and Test

Running a vanilla bxl.cmd without the -minimal flag above will compile a larger set of binaries as well as run tests. The non-minimal build still doesn't build everything, but it builds most tools a developer is likely to interact with. Running bxl.cmd -all will build everything in the repo

The -minimal and -all flags are shorthands that get translated to more complicated pip filter expressions which are eventually passed to bxl.exe

Build and Test for Linux

Since we do not support building BuildXL in Linux for now, we rely on unit tests for Linux development. Please refer to the instructions of how to test Linux.

Development workflow

Browsing source code in Visual Studio

Because we don't have deep Visual Studio integration for BuildXL at this time, you should use BuildXL's solution generation feature to generate MSBuild .proj files and a .sln. Prior to opening this solution you will need to install the Visual Studio plugin.

Once installed you can run the solution generation. The result will be placed in out\vs\BuildXL\ with a base filename matching the top-level directory of your enlistment. So for example if your enlistment directory is c:\enlist\BuildXL, the generated solution file will be out\vs\BuildXL\BuildXL.sln.

There are two modes for what to generate

  1. bxl -vs Generates most projects
  2. bxl -vsall Generates all flavors of all projects. If you are missing something try this

Consuming a locally build version of bxl.exe

By default the bxl command at the root of the repo will use a pre-build version of bxl.exe. FOr testing it can be helpful to use a locally build version.

  1. bxl -deploy dev -minimal will create a minimal, debug version of bxl.exe and "deploy" it to an output directory in the repo
  2. bxl -use dev will then use that locally built version of bxl.exe for the build session. The -use dev flag can be added to any invocation using the bxl.cmd convenience wrappers

Targeting your build (filtering)

You may want to build only a specific project or test if you are iterating on a single component. This can be achieved with filtering. See the filtering doc for full details, but a useful shorthand is to specify the spec file that you want to target. For example bxl IntegrationTest.BuildXL.Scheduler.dsc. See the filtering doc for more details of filtering shorthands.

Running specific tests

You can take this a step farther and specify a specific test method. This example sets a property which is consumed by the DScript test SDK. It causes a test case filter to be passd down to the test runner to run a specific test method based on a fully qualified method name.

bxl IntegrationTest.BuildXL.Scheduler.dsc /p:[UnitTest]Filter.testMethod=IntegrationTest.BuildXL.Scheduler.BaselineTests.VerifyGracefulTeardownOnPipFailure

Be careful with typos in the method name. If the filter doesn't match any test cases the run will still pass. For a sense of security it can help to make the unit test fail the first time you use a filter to make sure your filter is correct.

You can also filter by test class. Again, be careful to make sure you don't inadvertantly filter out all tests. For example specifying both a testClass and a testMethod will cause no tests to match

bxl IntegrationTest.BuildXL.Scheduler.dsc /p:[UnitTest]Filter.testClass=IntegrationTest.BuildXL.Scheduler.BaselineTests

Debugging

The easiest way to get a debugger attached to bxl.exe is to specify an environmental variable called BuildXLDebugOnStart and set it to 1. This will cause a debugger window to pop up and will let you choose a running Visual Studio instance to attach to the process and start debugging. Alternatively, placing a good old System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch(); inside the code you want to debug, re-compiling BuildXL and running it with the -use Dev flag does the trick too.