Building GRPC via Bazel without BoringSSL

[priy...@gmail.com]

Hello,

I am trying to compile GRPC without BoringSSL. Looks like this is supported via cmake. Is there a way to also support it via Bazel? My current understanding is that the Bazel build unconditionally depends on @boringssl//:ssl.

We are using Bazel to build a custom binary that links in aws-cpp-sdk and grpc. It seems like aws-cpp-sdk wants openssl while grpc seems to want boringssl. We are currently exploring defining a fake `boringssl` local_repository which has a single target (`@boringssl//:ssl` which points to system provided openssl). Would love to know if this is likely to be a fool's errand.

Regards!

[Richard Belleville]

"We are currently exploring defining a fake `boringssl` local_repository which has a single target (`@boringssl//:ssl` which points to system provided openssl)"

This actually sounds ideal to me. Compare what the protobuf repo does about Python headers. If you come up with a robust repository rule to pull in the system openssl, consider making it available as an example. I imagine it will be useful to many besides yourself.

[Nicolas Noble]

The trick here is that there's no official Bazel BUILD file for OpenSSL. There's still ways to build OpenSSL using bazel, but I find it a bit iffy:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58094591/build-makefile-target-in-bazel/58106111#58106111  

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[priy...@gmail.com]

To close the loop, the following "hack" worked for us. We ended up defining the following repository before grpc in our WORKSPACE file.

new_local_repository(

    name = "boringssl",

    path = "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu",

    build_file_content = """

cc_library(

  name = "ssl",

  linkopts = ["-lssl", "-lcrypto"],

  visibility = ["//visibility:public"],

)

""",

)

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[Ben Landrum]

The trick above works, although I set the path to the OpenSSL header directory on my system (/usr/include/openssl), so that the target can provide the headers as well as the libraries.

native.new_local_repository(
    name = "boringssl",
    path = "/usr/include/openssl",

    build_file_content = """
cc_library(
    name = "ssl",

    hdrs = glob(["*"]),
    copts = ["-lcrypto", "-lssl"],
)
""",
)

In lieu of an official OpenSSL Bazel build, could workarounds like this be officially supported and mentioned in the build instructions?