Welcome to bazel-starters — a collection of ready-to-go, language-specific starter repos for getting productive with Bazel fast.

Bazel is a powerful, fast, and scalable build system — but it's famously tricky to adopt. The learning curve comes from:

• 🧩 Its highly customizable nature (and endless config options)
• 🔄 Needing to re-learn tooling (formatting, linting, testing, dependency management)
• 🧱 Writing a lot of boilerplate before you even build "Hello, World"
• 🐛 Getting your .bazelrc, toolchains, and external deps just right

We’ve been there. That’s why these starter repos exist.

Each starter repo includes:

• 📦 Curated bazelrc flags via bazelrc-preset.bzl
• 🧰 Developer environment setup with bazel_env.bzl
• 🎨 Formatting and linting built-in, using rules_lint
• ✅ Pre-commit hooks for automatic linting and formatting
• 📚 Language-specific package manager integration (e.g. pip, go.mod, npm, etc.)
• 🧱 Latest Bazel version pinned and working
• 🐳 Docker container support using rules_oci
• 🧪 Code generation tools (e.g. copier, scaffold, yeoman) to help you and your team stamp out new services or components quickly

1. Pick the repo for your preferred language
2. Click the big green “Use this template” button on the repo homepage
3. Name your new repo and start coding — Bazel is ready to go!

You can also choose a subset of the features and languages. Install the scaffold tool and run scaffold new github.com/aspect-build/aspect-workflows-template to launch an interactive wizard.

If you need to build a full-stack monorepo with multiple languages, check out:

➡️ starter-kitchen-sink

It includes everything wired together — perfect for full-featured Bazel exploration.

We welcome contributions!

The source-of-truth for these templates is https://github.com/aspect-build/aspect-workflows-template That repo has a GitHub Actions automation to run the Scaffold tool on a number of pre-defined "presets", and each of these is simply pushed to the corresponding Git repo on every commit to main.

Please create your issues or PRs over there.

Built with ❤️ by folks at Aspect Build who want Bazel to Just Work™️.