User managed dependencies

This example shows how to write a simple Node.js program using nodejs rules from source and user managed npm dependencies.

npm dependencies

In this example, we do the opposite of the e2e/bazel_managed_deps. Instead, the dependencies are managed explicitly by the user. While we typically prefer to have Bazel manage dependencies, this option could be useful if you vendor the depnedencies into your repository, or use a custom package manager that's not integrated with Bazel.

index.js is the trivial program. You can run it like:

$ bazel run :example 1
Running program
increment 1 is 2

index.spec.js is a test. Run it with:

$ bazel test :test

//:test PASSED in 0.2s

Executed 1 out of 1 test: 1 test passes.

WORKSPACE dependencies from source

When using user managed npm dependencies it is not possible to use the npm to install Bazel rules from npm packages such as @bazel/jasmine or @bazel/typescript. Instead, these dependencies are specified in your WORKSPACE file from source. For example to use the jasmine rules:

load("@bazel_tools//tools/build_defs/repo:http.bzl", "http_archive")
http_archive(
    name = "npm_bazel_jasmine",
    urls = ["https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_nodejs/archive/0.35.0.tar.gz"],
    strip_prefix = "rules_nodejs-0.35.0/packages/jasmine/src",
    sha256 = "48be6c21d4ee7bf2a6c3dd35ac54f8ff430944b65ab7a43a9cd742f23c9a7279",
)

In most cases you will also need the build_bazel_rules_nodejs dev dependencies installed to use the rules from source.

load("@build_bazel_rules_nodejs//:package.bzl", "rules_nodejs_dev_dependencies")
rules_nodejs_dev_dependencies()