What is Buildifier?
Buildifier is an essential linter and formatter designed for Bazel. It ensures that your build scripts follow the best practices and styling guidelines recommended by the Bazel community. By automatically formatting your code, buildifier helps maintain consistency, readability, and reduces the likelihood of syntax errors.
Installing Buildifier
With Trunk Check, you can automatically install and configure Buildifier along with any relevant linters in a few straightforward steps. Here's how:
First, if you haven't already installed Trunk CLI, you can do so with the command below:
1curl https://get.trunk.io -fsSL | bash
Next, you can initialize Trunk from the root of your git repository:
1trunk init
This command will scan your repository and create a .trunk/trunk.yaml file that enables all linters, formatters, and security analyzers, recommended by Trunk Check. This includes Buildifier if applicable to your project.
To see all available linters Trunk Check installed, simply run:
1trunk check list
If you find Buildifier is not automatically enabled, you can do so by running:
1trunk check enable buildifier
Alternatively, to disable Buildifier run the command below. To disable other tooling applied by Trunk Check, simply replace buildifier with the respective tool you're looking to disable.
1trunk check disable buildifier
For more details on Trunk Check setup, see here.
Configuring Buildifier
Most linters provide some mechanism to tweak their configuration, e.g. .eslintrc or Cargo.toml. Trunk is aware of all the ways individual tools are configured and supports them. This means linters you've already configured will continue to work exactly the same, just now supercharged by Trunk Check.
Like many linters with Trunk, Buildifier works out of the box so there's no need to set up a custom configuration. However, Buildifier does support the optional config file .buildifier.json. You can learn more about Buildifier and its config in our docs.
If you're interested in other tooling outside of Buildifier, check out our open-source repository to see how we define and support 90+ linters.
Running Buildifier
To check your code with Buildifier, run the command below. This command executes Buildifier along with any other linters Trunk Check has enabled on files you've modified. Since Trunk is git-aware, it knows what you've changed, and by adding batched execution and caching, you end up with a much faster and smoother way to run Buildifier and other tools.
1trunk check
If you prefer to check files you've modified with Buildifier only, run the following:
1trunk check --filter=buildifier
Although we'd recommend against it depending on the size of your repository, you can check all files with Buildifier by running the command below.
1trunk check --all --filter=buildifier
In most scenarios, you'll want to execute against modified files. Since Trunk is git-aware, it knows what you've changed, and by adding batched execution and caching, you end up with a much faster and smoother way to run Buildifier and other tools.
Updating Trunk Check & Buildifier
To upgrade the Trunk CLI along with all plugins and linters in your trunk.yaml simply run:
1trunk upgrade
We highly recommend running on the latest validated versions of tools as updates will frequently include important security fixes and additional valuable checks. Trunk only auto-suggests linter upgrades to versions that we have tested and support, so you may see a slight lag time when a new linter version is released.
Upgrade will also recommend new tools that have become applicable since the last time your repository was scanned. This can be a result of using new technologies in your repository or Trunk itself adding support for more tools. If you don't like a particular recommendation, you can always run trunk check disable <linter> to teach trunk not to recommend it.