Bazel 9.0 is now available!

[Karolina Kalin]

Bazel 9.0 is now available!

We are excited to announce that Bazel 9 has finally landed!

This release brings you a few major changes and lots of improvements that will benefit the users as well as the health of the Bazel ecosystem.

Highlights:

• Bzlmod fully replaces WORKSPACE.

  • The Bzlmod migration tool is available to help with your migration.

• Starlarkification has landed

• Prebuilt protobuf compiler

We highly encourage you to read through the details of what's new, what's coming and what's gone:

• Bazel 9 LTS blog post by Xudong Yang

• 9.0.0 Release Notes on GitHub

''As with every major release, Bazel 9 introduces incompatible changes. Most of these have been included in our release notes. However, if you run into any difficulties while upgrading, we encourage you to visit the Bazel 9 migration GitHub discussion to ask for help or contribute your own fixes.''

''A big thank-you to the entire Bazel community for your support. Whether it was filing issues, contributing code, or discussing ideas, every little bit helped to make Bazel 9 possible. We hope you'll continue to participate and follow along through the usual channels: GitHub Discussions, the Bazel Slack channel, @bazelbuild on X (Twitter), the Bazel blog, and the bazel-discuss mailing list. See you next time!''

A few more updates

6.6.0 released Jan 26

This will be the last minor release of Bazel 6, fixing incompatibilities with macOS Tahoe, thanks to our community member Mike Bland!

With the launch of Bazel 9, we will deprecate Bazel 6 according to our release model. We will no longer be backporting fixes for security and OS compatibility issues to 6.x.

Upcoming releases

• Bazel 8.6.0 is expected to be released around the middle of February.

• Bazel 9.1.0 is expected to be released in first half of April.

In the works

• New Bazel documentation site

• A new web UI for Bazel Central Registry

• Starlark typing

Find more details on what's next in the most recent blog post!

Karolina, on behalf of the Bazel team