Bazel clean only a subset of the cached rules

Question

I am currently developing in a monorepo that has a pretty large workspace file.

Right now, I am noting that one of my testing rules, is not getting its dependency rules re-built when I update one of my tests. Here is an example of this:

load("@npm//@grafana/toolkit:index.bzl", "grafana_toolkit")
load("@build_bazel_rules_nodejs//:index.bzl", "copy_to_bin")

APPLICATION_DEPS = glob(
    [   
        # My updated test file is included in this glob
        "src/**/*", 
    ],
) + [
    "my-config-files.json"
]

RULE_DEPS = [
    "@npm//@grafana/data",
    "@npm//@grafana/ui",
    "@npm//emotion",
    "@npm//fs-extra",
]

copy_to_bin(
    name = "bin_files",
    srcs = APPLICATION_DEPS,
)


grafana_toolkit(
    name = "test",
    args = [
        "plugin:test",
    ],
    chdir = package_name(),
    data = RULE_DEPS + [
        ":bin_files",
    ],
)

I then have a file called maybe something.test.ts. I run bazel run :test and my test might show that I failed and I see the problem and fix it. The problem is that the next time I run my test, I see from the output that it's still failing because it's running the old test instead of the new test.

The Problem

The way that I normally fix this sort of issue with stale files not updating, is by running bazel clean. The problem is that doing bazel clean means I clean EVERYTHING. And that makes re-running all the build steps take pretty damn long. I'm wondering if there is a way I can specify that I only clean a subset of the cache (maybe only the output of my bin_files rule, for example). That way, rather than starting all over again, I only rebuild what I want to rebuild.

Answer 1

I've actually found a pretty quick and easy way to do what I was originally asking is basically to just go to the bazel-bin directory, and delete the output of whichever rule it is I want to re-run. So maybe in this case, I could delete the bin_files output in my bazel-bin directory then run my bin_files rule again.

With that being said, I think @ahumsky might be right in that if you're needing to do this, it's more likely a bug with something else. In my case, I was running a build version of my rule instead of a test version of my rule. So, cleaning a subset of my cache didn't really have anything to do with my original problem.