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,
git submodule add https://github.com/matzkowsky/bazel-compilation-database bazel-compdb
bazel-compdb/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",
],
remove_workspace_root_marker = True,
)Note that you will have to replace "WORKSPACE_ROOT" in the generated file with
the output of bazel info workspace. Or you can set remove_workspace_root_marker
attribute to False in which case, the directory entry will simply be
bazel-{workspace name}
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.