We have a bazel_binary which iterates through all the subdirectories of a fixed directory, and parses the .json files in them, as follows. We want to use a directory iterator because this directory can have more subdirectories in future with new .json files in them.

for (const auto& entry : std::filesystem::directory_iterator("/system/artefacts")) {
  if (entry.is_directory()) {
    // find .json files and do stuff with them
  }
}

We are using bazel to build and run this binary, the bazel target looks like:

cc_binary(
    name = "dir_iterator",
    srcs = [
        "dir_iterator.cpp",
    ],
    data = [
        ":data",
    ],
    deps = [
        #...
    ],
)

filegroup(
    name = "data",
    srcs = glob([
        "system/artefacts", # does NOT work
    ]),
)

When we run this target with bazel run it fails with the following error:

t3-build-shell-5.0$ bazel run //utils:dir_iterator
INFO: Analyzed target //utils:dir_iterator (1 packages loaded, 8 targets configured).
INFO: Found 1 target...
Target //utils:dir_iterator up-to-date:
  bazel-bin/utils/dir_iterator
INFO: Elapsed time: 1.082s, Critical Path: 0.01s
INFO: 1 process: 1 internal.
INFO: Build completed successfully, 1 total action
INFO: Running command line: bazel-bin/utils/dir_iterator
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::filesystem::__cxx11::filesystem_error'
  what():  filesystem error: directory iterator cannot open directory: No such file or directory [system/artifacts/]
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::filesystem::__cxx11::filesystem_error'
  what():  filesystem error: directory iterator cannot open directory: No such file or directory [system/artefacts/]

This is because bazel is not including the directory in question in the runtime environment.

So the question is: how can I include the directory in question with this bazel target, to get rid of this error?

Directory structure of bazel workspace

.
├── system
│   └── artefacts
│       ├── x
│       │   └── a.json
│       ├── y
│       │   └── a.json
│       └── z
│           └── a.json
└── util
    ├── BUILD
    └── dir_iterator.cpp