Logger application

This example contains a logging service, with code in lots of languages, communicating with gRPC. It's meant as a simulation of the kind of monorepo you likely work in.

Here are the components of the application:

• schema/ generates code for all languages to agree on the protocol, using protobuf and gRPC.
• backend/ has a server written in Go which stores messages.
• client/ is a sample of a program that wants to store log messages, written in Java.
• frontend/ is a web site written in TypeScript.
• cli/ is a terminal-based frontend for viewing the messages, written in Python.
• ios/ contains an iOS application that sends log messages to the backend server, written in Swift.

It was originally in the https://github.com/aspect-build/codelabs repo. We stopped maintaining that because it's confusing for novice product engineers to drop into an "all languages at once" monorepo, and have an easier time starting from aspect init.

Running the frontend

Frontend developers are already trained how to run their code: with npm scripts. There's no need to force them to change their behavior when adopting Bazel.

For example you can

cd logger/frontend
npm start

Thanks to the start entry in the package.json#scripts object, this knows to run ibazel run [some-target] to correctly bring up the devserver (in this case, Vite) in watch mode.

Now try changing the TypeScript or HTML code for the web frontend. As soon as you save, the browser should auto-refresh with the changed code.

Coming from the npm ecosystem, you may be surprised that no npm install is necessary or helpful. Using ibazel to run the target directs Bazel to build everything needed for that target, which includes any necessary dependency fetching.