README.md

Bazel Project with Drake as an External (legacy style)

This pulls in Drake and builds it from source via Bazel's WORKSPACE mechanism, which is deprecated as of Bazel 8 and will be removed in Bazel 9. Therefore, we do not recommend using this example for new projects; instead, refer to the drake_bazel_external example. The legacy example primarily serves as a regression test for the deprecated behavior, and therefore uses Drake's minimum supported Bazel version.

For an introduction to Bazel, refer to Getting Started with Bazel.

Instructions

First, run the install_prereqs script to download the Drake source to drake/ (from the current directory). This also runs Drake's setup script to install the required Ubuntu packages:

setup/install_prereqs

Then, to build and test all apps:

bazel test //...

As an example to run a binary directly:

bazel run //apps:simple_logging_example

You may also run the binary directly per the bazel-bin/... path that the above command prints out; however, be aware that your working directories may cause differences. This is important when using tools like drake::FindResource / pydrake.common.FindResource. You may generally want to stick to using bazel run when able.

Python Versions

By default, Python 3 is the Python interpreter that Drake will use when built with Bazel. To see which Python versions are supported, see the supported configurations.