This directory contains logic to support the drake_bazel_installed use case, where external users can consume Drake binary releases via Bazel.

The support for this feature is currently under development and experimental. In the future, we plan to document it as the "drake_bazel_installed" project within https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/drake-external-examples.

The implementation mechanism is a single repo.bzl file that the user loads into their WORKSPACE, which is then able to rehydrate the @drake workspace based on the installed file paths.

We need to consolidate all of the rules and data needed by repo.bzl into a single file, because loading sibling files as part of repo.bzl execution from the binary install tree is difficult.

The repo_template.bzl file in this directory is the starting point to create repo.bzl. The repo_gen.py script replaces some constants in that template with new values during the Drake source build. In particular:

(1) The drake*.BUILD.bazel files in this directory are repacked into the second half of repo.bzl as data, to be rehydrated into the @drake workspace for use by the user.

(2) The generate_installed_files_manifest transcribes the list of installed file paths into a manifest.bzl file, which is used by both repo.bzl and drake*.BUILD.bazel to understand the list of files.

By convention, drake*BUILD.bazel targets that are private scaffolding specific to drake_bazel_installed are named using a leading dot (e.g., .pydrake), to distinguish them from public labels that would appear in a Drake source build.