We just pushed a support for shell completion in the Bourne-Again Shell. It eases the use of Bazel by expanding its commands and the targets to build.

To use this new functionality, build the //scripts:bash_completion target from the Bazel repository: bazel build //scripts:bash_completion

This will create a bazel-bin/scripts/bazel-complete.bash completion script. You can copy then copy this script to your completion directory (/etc/bash_completion.d in Ubuntu). If you don't want to install it globally or don't have such a directory, simply add the following line to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile (the latter is the recommended for OS X): source /path/to/bazel/bazel-bin/scripts/bazel-complete.bash

After that you should be able to type the tab key after the bazel command in your shell and see the list of possible completions.

If you are interested in supporting other shells, the script is made up of two parts:

1. scripts/bazel-complete-header.bash is the completion logic.
2. bazel help completion dumps the list of commands of Bazel, their options and for commands and options that expect a value, a description of what is expected. This description is either:

• an enum of values enclosed into brackets, e.g., {a,b,c};

• a type description, currently one of:

  • label, label-bin, label-test, label-package for a Bazel label for, respectively, a target, a runnable target, a test, and a package,
  • path for a filesystem path,
  • info-key for one of the information keys as listed by bazel info;

• a combination of possible values using | as a separator, e.g, path|{or,an,enum}'.

Let us know if you have any questions or issues on the mailing list or GitHub.