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DeveloperGuide.md

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Prerequesites

Windows

  • You should use Windows 10 with BuildXL. You do not need to install Visual Studio to get a working build, but it can be very helpful and is recommended for Windows development.
  • You will also need to install the Windows development kit. When you build the repo, the build script will determine if you have a compatible version installed and provide an error message with a link if one needs to be installed

macOS

To run BuildXL on macOS you need to install:

  • Microsoft .NET Core SDK for macOS
  • The latest Mono runtime
  • If you want to run and load the sandbox to enable fully observed and cacheable builds, you also have to turn off System Integrity Protection (SIP) on macOS. SIP blocks the installation of the unsigned kernel extension (or Kext) produced by the build.
  • Latest version of xcode
  • XCode 10.3. Obtainable from https://developer.apple.com/download/more/. After downloading, either adjust this path to where you have placed the tool or put everything into your /Applications folder, renaming the app to 'Xcode_10.3' so the xcodebuild executable can be found

Performing a build

bxl.cmd (and ./bxl.sh) are the entry points to building BuildXL. They provide some shorthands for common tasks to prevent developers from needing to specify longer command line options. While most examples below are based off of bxl.cmd for Windows, there will most times be a bxl.sh equivalent for macOS.

Minimal Build

From The root of the enlistment run bxl.cmd -minimal. This will:

  1. Download the latest pre-build version of bxl.exe
  2. Use it to pull all package dependencies
  3. Perform a build of the BuildXL repo scoped to just bxl.exe and its required dependencies.
  4. Deploy a runnable bxl.exe to out\bin\debug\win-x64.

Note you do not need administrator (elevated) privileges for your console window.

Build and Test

Running a vanilla bxl.cmd without the -minimal flag above will compile a larger set of binaries as well as run tests. The non-minimal build still doesn't build everything, but it builds most tools a developer is likely to interact with. Running bxl.cmd -all will build everything in the repo

The -minimal and -all flags are shorthands that get translated to more complicated pip filter expressions which are eventually passed to bxl.exe

Development workflow

Browsing source code in Visual Studio

Because we don't have deep Visual Studio integration for BuildXL at this time, you can use bxl -vs which will generate MSBuild .proj files and a .sln for the project under out\vs\BuildXL\ with a base filename matching the top-level directory of your enlistment. So for example if your enlistment directory is c:\enlist\BuildXL, the generated solution file will be out\vs\BuildXL\BuildXL.sln.

Prior to opening this solution you will need to install the Visual Studio plugin.

Consuming a locally build version of bxl.exe

By default the bxl command at the root of the repo will use a pre-build version of bxl.exe. FOr testing it can be helpful to use a locally build version.

  1. bxl -deploy dev -minimal will create a minimal, debug version of bxl.exe and "deploy" it to an output directory in the repo
  2. bxl -use dev will then use that locally built version of bxl.exe for the build session. The -use dev flag can be added to any invocation using the bxl.cmd convenience wrappers

Running specific tests

You may want to build only a specific project or test if you are iterating on a single component. This can be achieved with filtering. See the filtering doc for full details, but a useful shorthand is to specify the spec file that you want to target. For example bxl IntegrationTest.BuildXL.Scheduler.dsc

You can take this a step farther and specify a specific test method. This example sets a property which is consumed by the DScript test SDK. It causes a test case filter to be passd down to the test runner to run a specific test method based on a fully qualified method name.

bxl IntegrationTest.BuildXL.Scheduler.dsc /p:[UnitTest]Filter.testMethod=IntegrationTest.BuildXL.Scheduler.BaselineTests.VerifyGracefulTeardownOnPipFailure

Be careful with typos in the method name. If the filter doesn't match any test cases the run will still pass. For a sense of security it can help to make the unit test fail the first time you use a filter to make sure your filter is correct.

You can also filter by test class. Again, be careful to make sure you don't inadvertantly filter out all tests. For example specifying both a testClass and a testMethod will cause no tests to match

bxl IntegrationTest.BuildXL.Scheduler.dsc /p:[UnitTest]Filter.testClass=IntegrationTest.BuildXL.Scheduler.BaselineTests