Setting up the Workspace

Introduction

In your home directory, create a folder called “projects”. This only matters due to some limitations in the workspace configuration file. Vscode extensions for Java and Go WILL NOT support variable expressions for paths.

Limitations

This project is currently setup in “/opt/projects”. Why /opt? Because writing a turorial to create a ‘/data/projects’ directory on MacOS seems to be a hit-and-miss since / is a read-only mount, and /etc/synthetic.conf has other issues.

Steps

# Create a projects directory, this example creates it on the /opt file system
# This IS NOT recommended, but is done so for the sake of a conistant development environment.
# Please feel free to put this any path you have access, but you need to remember for a couple of changes.
sudo mkdir /opt/projects

cd /opt/projects

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/rrmcguinness/vscode-bazel-tutorial

# Run Bazel once before starting
bazel build //...

# Open Visual Studio Code

# If you changed the download location:
code .

# If you didn't change the download location:
code vscode-bazel-tutorial.code-workspace

Edit the workspace (IF YOU CHANGED THE DOWNLOAD LOCATION)

Once Visual Studio Code has opened, edit the vscode-bazel-tutorial.code-workspace file.

Change all occurances of “/opt/projects” to your download directoy. DO NOT attempt to use variables or relative links, they ARE NOT honored by the extensions.

Lastly, in the java.configuration.runtimes, if you ARE NOT using Apple OS X, then please change _macos with _linux or _windows accordingly.

Again, this is because a relative path, and command variable expansion IS NOT supported by the workpace file. Otherwise ${command:os_type} would work.

Once that change has been made, you may either “open workspace from file”, or close and reopen from the terminal with the last command above.

Start the Java Workspace

Navigate to java > src > service > CustomerService.java and open it.

When you open this file, it will start the Java Language Server, this will in-turn read the workspace file to determine where to find Java, and which dependencies to add to the classpath. ** More about that below.