Plugin System

The Aspect CLI has a plugin system that allows engineers to easily build features on top of Bazel.

Glossary

• Aspect CLI Core, or simply Core, refers to the core system of the CLI that holds the control over the lifecycle of Plugin instances.
• Plugin instance, or sometimes just Plugin, refers to a binary application that uses this SDK to extend the functionality of the Core.
• Plugin maintainer refers to a person that maintains a Plugin implementation.
• Aspect CLI SDK refers to the development kit that abstracts away all the complexity of implementing a Plugin for the Core.

Overview

The Core exposes 2 integration categories for Plugins:

1. The Build Event Protocol (BEP).
2. Hooks for the lifecycle of the Core.

Integration categories

The Build Event Protocol (BEP)

The BEP is documented here. Plugins can listen to the BEP events in real-time. The Core intercepts all the events from Bazel using the exposed gRPC Build Event Service and re-constructing the original BEP events. The Core, then, forwards each event to the Plugins.

Hooks

The Core exposes multiple hook points that can be easily accessed when implementing Plugins with the SDK. See each SDK documentation for more details on which hooks are exposed.

Current SDK

See the current SDK README.