Loading copybara into another bazel WORKSPACE

[menny]

I'm trying to load Copybara into my internal Bazel WORKSPACE.
I added a http_archive statement to my WORKSPACE file:

http_archive(
    name = "copybara",
    url = "https://github.com/google/copybara/archive/4f8904964283a405beb9612eb30a5ef693d3f4f3.zip",
    type = "zip",
    sha256 = "b5f321ebc4932ed9b5673b80ea88fcccfad93dce68c76c81ce306c1ebf2b6b34",
    strip_prefix = "copybara-4f8904964283a405beb9612eb30a5ef693d3f4f3"
)

and then trying to build copybara: bazel build @copybara//java/com/google/copybara:copybara. At which point I get an error:

ERROR: Analysis of target ‘@copybara//java/com/google/copybara:copybara’ failed; build aborted: no such package ‘@flogger//jar’: The repository could not be resolved
INFO: Elapsed time: 0.194s
INFO: 0 processes.
FAILED: Build did NOT complete successfully (0 packages loaded)

I know this is not the main use-case of Copybara, but by having copybara part of my repo (as in, defined and pinned in my WORKSPACE file), I will be able to more easily create run targets that use Copybara.

[mikelalcon]

This is a known issue of Bazel, that it cannot make these transitive dependencies work. Your only workaround is to define those dependencies in your project.

[rohansingh]

I think, ideally, Copybara would define a deps.bzl that other projects could depend on. This seems to be standard practice in the Bazel world.

For now, you can copy the WORKSPACE into a copybara_deps.bzl in your local repository. You'll have to wrap it in a Skylark function, and then load and call that function in your own project's WORKSPACE.