Support ${workspaceFolder} in buildifier & bazel paths

I can add a bazel path relative to the vscode workspace root, but I can’t do the same for a buildifier path.

Here’s the buildifier path code which is not relative to the workspace root: https://github.com/bazelbuild/vscode-bazel/blob/d2e0b7dd9f387ee66829e960b2016dba474b2df8/src/buildifier/buildifier_availability.ts#L33

Here’s the bazel path code which is relative to the workspace root: https://github.com/bazelbuild/vscode-bazel/blob/8fbcd2769228731827c4b7c2ba3bbc36bb1f5e34/src/bazel/tasks.ts#L72

These should obviously use the same code and both should support paths relative to the workspace root 😃

Note: most other vscode extensions support putting ${workspaceRoot} in the path to refer to the vscode workspace root. For example, clangd, protoc, shellcheck, and python all do this, and I’m sure many more.

[dapirian]

It’s extremely common for extensions to support either relative paths from the workspace root or something like $workspace_root… so, do whatever they do? Perhaps just where the workspace file actually is?

[joneshf]

Is there a solution here that doesn’t require absolute paths for only the buildifier binary?

In case it’s not clear, we have to have settings like:

{
    "bazel.buildifierExecutable": "/Users/some-user/some-arbitrary-path-to-the-repo/tools/buildifier",
    "bazel.executable": "tools/bazel"
}

We can write the bazel.executable setting once and share it amongst a team, but we cannot write the bazel.buildifierExecutable setting once and share it amongst a team. The absolute path is almost never the same between different machines: platforms, users, personal preference, etc.

Instead, it would be ideal if we could use the same relative path support for buildifier that we can currently use for bazel:

{
    "bazel.buildifierExecutable": "tools/buildifier",
    "bazel.executable": "tools/bazel"
}