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Building

Santa uses Bazel for building, testing, and releaseing. The main branch on GitHub is always the source-of-truth.

Installing Bazelisk​

To ensure everyone is building with the correct version of Bazel, we use Bazelisk, which automatically downloads the appropriate version of Bazel when run.

If you don't already have bazel/bazelisk installed, you can use homebrew:

brew install bazelisk

This will add both bazelisk and bazel to your PATH.

Cloning​

git clone https://github.com/northpolesec/santa
cd santa

By default your checkout will be in the main branch, ready to start developing at head. As all releases are built from tagged commits, you can check out a specific release if you wish:

git checkout 2025.2

If you want to see which tags are available, you can run:

git tag --sort=createordate

Building​

To make using bazel easier we also have a simple Makefile which just invokes useful bazel commands. To ensure your changes are formatted correctly and build, you can run make in the root of the Santa repo:

make

Testing​

To run the full suite of Santa tests, you can run make test:

make test

Installing​

While working on Santa, it is useful to have a quick way to reload all Santa components. For this we have a special BUILD rule to handle this and it is exposed as the make command make reload.

However, because Santa is a system extension with special entitlements it is not as trivial to load Santa on a machine that is not registered as a machine owned by North Pole Security. To work around this, it is possible to reload an "adhoc" build, but only if you disable SIP:

  1. Boot into recvoery mode:

    • For Intel Macs, reboot and hold down Command + R
    • For Apple Silicon Macs, power off then press and hold the Power button until "Loading startup options" appears. Click Options, then Continue. If asked, select a volume to recover then click Next.

  2. From the Utilities menu click Terminal.

  3. Run csrutil disable to turn SIP off.

  4. Reboot.

Now you can build and run an adhoc build:

bazel run //:reload --define=SANTA_BUILD_TYPE=adhoc

IDE Setup​

If you want to use an IDE when developing Santa it is much more useful if your IDE understands the codebase to make suggestions, allow renaming variables and following definitions. You can have Bazel generate a compiler commands file that will let clangd understand Santa:

  1. Run make compile_commands. This will generate a compile_commands.json file in the root of the workspace.

  2. Configure your editor to use the compile_commands.json file for autocompletion.