Can't easily import googleapis into my WORKSPACE

The github.com/googleapis/googleapis repository has several .proto files for Google APIs, including for example the Google Assistant one.

Unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, they are missing BUILD files so it’s not possible to build them from Bazel by purely importing the remote repository.

I can vendor it as a stop-gap solution, no big deal, but this seems sub-optimal at scale.

1. Could the googleapis repo have BUILD.bazel files? OR
2. Could Bazel somehow live without explicitly checked in BUILD files for protos?

I would suggest that you consider the 2nd option. Imagine a world where a lot of people write gRPC services and want to publish them for the world to use. There needs to be an easy way for folks to share .protos and Bazel is almost the perfect solution, except that demanding that all upstream services have BUILD files makes it hard to even get started.

Would it be possible to improve this? Thanks!

[damienmg]

We have https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-packages about making BUILD for other repository.

What I think we should have is BUILD files in googleapis. I don’t know who to speak to get that though, maybe @ola-rozenfeld knows?

[meteorcloudy]

I don’t think we should provide BUILD files for other repository, I believe the first option is the correct way to go. As for .proto files, maybe you also need to import https://github.com/google/protobuf ? @damienmg What do you think?