Bazel vs Buildbot

Overview

Buildbot

Stacks73

Followers128

Votes27

GitHub Stars5.4K

Forks1.7K

Bazel

Stacks313

Followers579

Votes133

Bazel vs Buildbot: What are the differences?

What is Bazel? Correct, reproducible, fast builds for everyone. Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.

What is Buildbot? Python-based continuous integration testing framework. BuildBot is a system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. By automatically rebuilding and testing the tree each time something has changed, build problems are pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure.

Bazel and Buildbot are primarily classified as "Java Build" and "Continuous Integration" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Bazel are:

Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages.
High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations.
Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones.

On the other hand, Buildbot provides the following key features:

run builds on a variety of slave platforms
arbitrary build process: handles projects using C, Python, whatever
minimal host requirements: Python and Twisted

"Fast" is the primary reason why developers consider Bazel over the competitors, whereas "Highly configurable builds" was stated as the key factor in picking Buildbot.

Bazel and Buildbot are both open source tools. It seems that Bazel with 12.2K GitHub stars and 2K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Buildbot with 3.98K GitHub stars and 1.36K GitHub forks.

Asana, Square, and Google are some of the popular companies that use Bazel, whereas Buildbot is used by Mozilla, Animoto, and Fetch Robotics. Bazel has a broader approval, being mentioned in 11 company stacks & 7 developers stacks; compared to Buildbot, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.

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Advice on Buildbot, Bazel

Sri Srinivas

Feb 11, 2020

Needs advice

I want to start automatic regressions for nightly builds and also continuous integration builds. The tests I ran are part of my regression suite. And I want to track the results of these tests.

I am able to do this with Jenkins using the Junit plugin. But, I am trying to do the same with Buildbot, and I am not able to get the report of the tests. So, I just want to know is it possible to get the reporting of tests through Buildbot. If yes, could anyone provide some examples

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Detailed Comparison

Buildbot	Bazel
BuildBot is a system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. By automatically rebuilding and testing the tree each time something has changed, build problems are pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure.	Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.
run builds on a variety of slave platforms;arbitrary build process: handles projects using C, Python, whatever;minimal host requirements: Python and Twisted;slaves can be behind a firewall if they can still do checkout;status delivery through web page, email, IRC, other protocols;track builds in progress, provide estimated completion time;flexible configuration by subclassing generic build process classes;debug tools to force a new build, submit fake Changes, query slave status;released under the GPL	Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages;High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations;Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones;Reproducibility: In BUILD files, each library, test, and binary must specify its direct dependencies completely. Bazel uses this dependency information to know what must be rebuilt when you make changes to a source file, and which tasks can run in parallel. This means that all builds are incremental and will always produce the same result;Scalable: Bazel can handle large builds
Statistics
GitHub Stars 5.4K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 1.7K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 73	Stacks 313
Followers 128	Followers 579
Votes 27	Votes 133
Pros & Cons
Pros 9 Highly configurable builds 5 Beautiful waterfall 5 Hosted internally 4 Free open source 3 Python	Pros 28 Fast 20 Deterministic incremental builds 17 Correct 16 Multi-language 14 Enforces declared inputs/outputs Cons 3 No Windows Support 2 Bad IntelliJ support 1 Constant breaking changes 1 Poor windows support for some languages 1 Learning Curve
Integrations
No integrations available	Java Objective-C C++

What are some alternatives to Buildbot, Bazel?

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

Gradle

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

GoCD

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers business a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Bazel are:

Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages.
High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations.
Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones.

On the other hand, Buildbot provides the following key features:

run builds on a variety of slave platforms
arbitrary build process: handles projects using C, Python, whatever
minimal host requirements: Python and Twisted

"Fast" is the primary reason why developers consider Bazel over the competitors, whereas "Highly configurable builds" was stated as the key factor in picking Buildbot.

Bazel vs Buildbot