How to prevent Bazel from rebuilding every time after changing environments?

[ubgk]

With our existing .bazelrc configuration, the build cache is invalidated every time you bazel build in a different environment, such as when changing between conda environments or even between different terminals (e.g. VSCode and your default terminal application).

There is an option in bazel incompatible_strict_action_env which normalises your PATH variable such that it is not inherited from the host.

If your builds do not depend on specific PATH values (e.g. if you don't use conda installed compilers), you can pass this flag in your commands, or even add it to your .bazelrc to prevent Bazel from rebuilding every time your PATH changes, e.g.:

build --compilation_mode=opt
build --copt="-Werror=return-type"
build --cxxopt=-std=c++17
...
build --incompatible_strict_action_env  # use static PATH
...