Use globs to group files

Problem

You're creating a target definition for library, binary, or other target and want to easily group multiple files as source files.

Solution

Instead of listing files one by one, e.g. sources=['file1', 'file2', 'file3'], you can directly use globs like *.java. To exclude certain files or globs, you can prefix the value with !, like !ignore.java.

Discussion

Let's say that you're creating a scala_library target definition and you want to include, as sources, all of the .scala files contained in the same directory as your BUILD file. Here's an example target definition that would accomplish that using a globs:

scala_library(
  name='lib',
  sources=['*.scala'],
)

If you had Scala files in sub-directories that you wanted to include as well, you could use a recursive glob:

scala_library(
  name='lib',
  sources=['**/*.scala'],
)

You can also exclude files from a particular directory:

scala_library(
  name='lib',
  sources=['**/*.scala', '!dir_to_exclude/**/*.scala'],
)

See Also

• Create a New Scala or Java Library Target
• Define a New Python Library Target