Decomposing the DAML assistant for better Bazel integration

Questions
1

Hi,

following up on Managing package dependencies with Bazel - #6 by cocreature

maybe even go lower-level and construct them manually

can somebody please point me at anything that is out there that would help me directly invoke the tools underlying the DAML Assistant? I am expecting to be able to create faster and more robust Bazel builds when bypassing the DAML Assistant.

Regards,
Alex

1 Like
2

I depends which tools you are trying to use. Some commands like daml ledger are part of the assistant. There is no way to circumvent it. The Daml compiler is a binary you can find in your install directory (eg ~/.daml/sdk/1.10.0/damlc/damlc). All the JVM-based tools like Sandbox, JSON API, Navigator, etc are bundled into a single JAR file. You can start them with commands of the kind

java -jar ~/.daml/sdk/1.10.0/daml-sdk/daml-sdk.jar sandbox

However, note that these are undocumented internal APIs. We don’t guarantee backward-compatibility for these. So for that kind of tooling, you are better off in my opinion to use stand-alone equivalents. Ie replace Sandbox with Daml for PostgreSQL and use the standalone JSON API JAR file from GitHub releases.

1 Like
3

Thanks, Bernhard.

It is actually not clear to me yet where I intend to take this. I am just looking into ways on how to make my BAZEL based build faster. For example, daml test seems to rebuild the .dar file, instead of using the one that a previous daml build has just produced. I suspect it is things like these that make the build slow. But I need to investigate further before I can say with more certainty.

Regards,
Alex