If you use Bazel and want to use libclang based editors and tools, you can now generate JSON compilation database easily without using build intercept hooks. The advantage is that you can generate the database even if your source code does not compile, and the generation process is much faster.
For more information on compilation database, Guillaume Papin has an excellent article.
Make the files in this github repo available somewhere in your repo, and run
the generate.sh script. This will create a compile_commands.json file at
your workspace root. For example,
RELEASE_VERSION=0.3.1
curl -L https://github.com/grailbio/bazel-compilation-database/archive/${RELEASE_VERSION}.tar.gz | tar -xz
bazel-compilation-database-${RELEASE_VERSION}/generate.shAn alternative to running the generate.sh script is to define a target of
rule type compilation_database with the attribute targets as a list of
top-level cc_.* labels which you want to include in your compilation database.
For example,
## Replace workspace_name and dir_path as per your setup.
load("@workspace_name//dir_path:aspects.bzl", "compilation_database")
compilation_database(
name = "example_compdb",
targets = [
"//a_cc_binary_label",
"//a_cc_library_label",
],
# ideally should be the same as `bazel info execution_root`.
exec_root = "/path/to/bazel/exec_root",
)If you want to use this project solely for semantic auto completion using
ycmd (YouCompleteMe) based editor plugins, then the recommended approach
is to set your extra conf script to the bundled .ycm_extra_conf.py. With this,
you don't have to maintain a separate compile_commands.json file through a
script and/or a compilation_database target. Compile commands are fetched
from bazel as the files are opened in your editor.
Follow the instructions as above for making the files available in this repo
somewhere in the workspace, and then configure vim to use the
.ycm_extra_conf.py script that you just extracted. One way is to make a
symlink to the py script from the top of your workspace root. Another way is to
set the ycm_global_ycm_extra_conf variable in vim.
Contributions are most welcome. Please submit a pull request giving the owners of this github repo access to your branch for minor style related edits, etc.
Please check open issues at the github repo.
We have tested only for C and C++ code, and with tools like YouCompleteMe, rtags, and the woboq code browser.
These approaches could be more accurate than the approach of this tool in some rare cases, but need a more complicated setup and a full build every time you refresh the database.