drake_bazel_external

Bazel Project with Drake as an External

This pulls in Drake via the Bazel workspace mechanism.

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

Instructions

First, install the required Ubuntu packages:

sudo ../scripts/setup/linux/ubuntu/xenial/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 2 is the Python interpreter that Drake will use when built with Bazel. To see which Python versions are supported, see the supported configurations.

You can specify your Python interpreter for this project by creating / modifying user.bazelrc (included via .bazelrc) to specify --python_path=... and --action_env=DRAKE_PYTHON_BIN_PATH=....

An example of using Python 3 on Ubuntu Bionic:

build --python_path=/usr/bin/python3
build --action_env=DRAKE_PYTHON_BIN_PATH=/usr/bin/python3

Note: If your project needs to support multiple Python versions, it is suggested to use Bazel's --config mechanism. In Drake, --config=python3 is used.