Running bicep build should compile everything in the directory

[ouldsid]

It is nice to be able run bicep build from within a folder and if no file (s) provided as an argument the tools iterate through the folder and compiles all bicep files within that folder (I'm not sure we have a file that is equivalent to csproj for example in C#)

[kuhlman-labs]

If we want to be able to create reusable modules this functionality is vital. This also will help with keeping bicep files more readable and manageable, some deployments are going to be quite large. A common pattern I have seen with customers using Terraform is that they will name the Terraform files for the functionality/resources it is deploying (ex. frontend.tf, backend.tf) and running their deployments from the root of the folder structure.

[stan-sz]

This answer #1285 (comment) seems relevant.

[ucheNkadiCode]

This has 8 or so upvotes across two different issues. Bicep build is also the highest used bicep cli commands after "bicep upgrad". While there are great options mentioned, users would have to ultimately search and find these issues each time to know the powershell commands. At first I was a big fan of changing the behavior of az bicep build to default to building all of the files in a particular directory, but I think the --all flag is a good addition.

The reason for the --all flag is, what if a user mistakenly writes az bicep build in their ~/User/Documents folder when they meant to also write --file blah.bicep? Or if they meant to write az bicep build --help? I wouldn't want to recursively start going through this many folders on an accident. The --all flag makes it more explicit in this case.

We could possibly put some safeguards to make sure this sort of mistake doesn't happen. I'm open to suggestions.

As @StefanIvemo mentioned in #1285, it would be a great idea to have:

bicep build --all - Compiles all .bicep files in the working directory.
bicep build --all --path /bicep/modules - Compiles all .bicep files in the /bicep/modules folder.

I propose this is retriaged.

[anthony-c-martin]

See #1285 for commands you can use to accomplish this today.