Ccache and Bazel

• September 5, 2019
• ccache  
• bazel  

Bazel defaults to building code in a sandbox that remounts most of the filesystem read-only. This means that if you are using ccache (Fedora, for example, will enable it by creating appropriate symlinks when you install the package) the compile job will fail because it can’t write to the cache directory.

The straightforward fix to this is to create a bazelrc file which specifies the Bazel sandbox_writable_path flag to make the cache directory writeable.

$ cat ~/.bazelrc
build --sandbox_writable_path=/home/jpeach/.ccache

Is ccache actually worth it with Bazel? Good question!