Switching back and forth from terminal to IDE requires rebuilds

Whenever I run a bazel build in the terminal and then switch to intellij and resync the project, it does a full rebuild. It says the options have changed so it’s discarding the cache.

Looking at the options it sets, --tool_tag stands out as an obvious one that is in the affects_output section of the Bazel CLI docs, so could that be causing it? There are others as well.

How necessary are these and are there any workarounds or improvements that could be made to make switching back and forth a little easier/faster?

If it sounds like I’m talking crazy talk because this isn’t happening for you, I can give more details about the project, if you point me in the right direction to start.

[prestonvanloon]

Ah! Thanks for the pointer. I was able to resolve my original issue by adding this to my bazelrc.

build --incompatible_strict_action_env

[chaoren]

Isn’t there some way to get deterministic builds with bazel?

The build is deterministic, given that the PATH and its contents stays the same. Do you mean hermetic build? I agree depending on the PATH is really not hermetic.

bazel calls out to some executables on your path for binaries that it doesn’t bundle (I think things like cp, mv for genrules). It’s just a possibility that it might affect build output, most of the time it doesn’t. bazel is just overly eager in assuming a rebuild is necessary. You can even add an empty directory to your PATH and it’ll trigger a rebuild (e.g., PATH=$PATH:/bogus/bin bazel build). It really should be something the bazel team should fix.