Finding What Buck Actually Built

Buck is a weird but very fast build tool that happens to be rather opaque about where it actually puts the things you build with it. They wind up somewhere under the buck-out folder but there’s no guarantee where and everything under there is considered buck’s private little scratch pad.

So how do you get build results out so they can be used? For things with built-in support like Java libraries you can use ‘buck publish’ to push them out to a repo but that doesn’t work for things you’ve built with a custom genrule. In those cases you could use an additional genrule build target to actually publish but it would only run when one of it’s dependencies have changed. Sometimes that’s an excellent feature but it’s not always what you want.

Similarly, you might want to actually run something you’ve built. You can almost always use the ‘buck run’ command to do that but it will tie up the buck daemon while it’s running so you can’t run two things at once.

For ultimate flexibility you really want to just find out where the built file is which thankfully is possible using ‘buck targets –show-full-output’. However it outputs both the target and it’s output:

$ buck targets --show-full-output //support/bigfeedback:bigfeedback
//bigfeedback:bigfeedback /code/buck-out/gen/bigfeedback/bigfeedback.jar

To get just the target file we need to pipe it through:

cut -d ' ' -f 2-

Or as a handy reusable bash function:

function findOutput() {
    $BUCK targets --show-full-output ${1} | cut -d ' ' -f 2-
}