[mikn]

Hi! Previously mentioned ex-Google SRE! There are a few layers to it - to make it work "ok" you need to first have a tool runner wrapper rule that does something similar to:

```

ctx.actions.write(output="""

tool_path=$(realpath {tool_short_path})

cd ${{BUILD_WORKING_DIRECTORY}}

exec $tool_path

""".format(tool_short_path=tool.short_path)

```

The purpose of this rule is to ensure that the tool's CWD is actually where you are inside the repository and not within the runfiles folder that Bazel prepared for you.

The second step is to set up a symlink target, similar to this:

```

#! /usr/bin/env bash

tool_name=$(basename $0)

exec -a "$tool_name" bazel run --ui_event_filters=-info,-stdout,-stderr --noshow_progress //tools/bin:$tool_name -- "$@"

```

We need to filter out all UI events since for some tools we intercept (such as jq) it expects the stdout to be clean from other output when used programmatically.

We then create a symlink for each tool name (say kubectl) to this script from another folder, and then we use `direnv` to inject the folder of symlinks into the user's paths with an `.envrc` file in the repository root like this:

```

PATH=$PWD/tools/path:$PATH

```

We have had this in place for quite a while now - it does seem like this pattern has caught some more wind and buildbuddy.io has released a ruleset: https://github.com/buildbuddy-io/bazel_env.bzl paired with https://github.com/theoremlp/rules_multitool achieves the same thing that we have built internally, the main difference being that with the bazel run wrapper we have made, you always run the latest version, whereas with the bazel_env pattern you need to manually rerun their target to get the latest binaries. :)

[peterldowns]

Any chance you'll be releasing your rules? I'd love to see how you do it.

[lbhdc]

Thanks! I am gonna give this a try.