Release 8.7.0rc2 (2026-05-04)

Bazel 8.7.0 is a minor LTS release. It is fully backward compatible with Bazel 8.0 and contains selected changes by the Bazel community and Google engineers.

Configurability

• Fix launcher/launcher_maker for cross build, e.g. build windows binary on linux machine. (#29240)

External Dependencies

• package_group now supports labels with external repositories in the packages attribute (#28896).
• Added SOCKS proxy support. Bazel now accepts socks://, socks4://, and socks5:// URLs in HTTPS_PROXY/HTTP_PROXY environment variables and related system properties. (#29305)
• Adds the strip_components attribute to extract/download_and_extract/http_archive to allow stripping of path components when extracting files. (#29367)

Remote Execution

• Bazel now has experimental support for --rewind_lost_inputs, which can rerun actions within a single build to recover from (remote or disk) cache evictions. (#28971)
• Added --experimental_remote_cache_chunking flag to read and write large blobs to/from the remote cache in chunks. Requires server support. (#28900)

Starlark / Build Language

• string.splitlines() no longer treat u+0085 as a newline character when internal_starlark_utf_8_byte_strings is set (which defaults to true) (#28932)

Acknowledgments

This release contains contributions from many people at Google, as well as Boleyn Su, Fabian Meumertzheim, H5-O5, Jacob Nowjack, Justin Won, Keith Smiley, Mike Lundy, Sarad Pant, and Will Stranton.

Notice: Bazel installers contain binaries licensed under the GPLv2 with Classpath exception. Those installers should always be redistributed along with the source code.

Some versions of Bazel contain a bundled version of OpenJDK. The license of the bundled OpenJDK and other open-source components can be displayed by running the command bazel license. The vendor and version information of the bundled OpenJDK can be displayed by running the command bazel info java-runtime. The binaries and source-code of the bundled OpenJDK can be downloaded from our mirror server.

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