Syntax Highlighting

GitHub doesn’t recognize .bara.sky files by default, so they appear without syntax highlighting. Use .gitattributes to fix this.

The Problem

When you view copy.bara.sky on GitHub, it appears as plain text:

# No highlighting - hard to read
core.workflow(
    name = "default",
    origin = git.origin(url = "..."),
)

The Solution

Add a .gitattributes file to your repository root:

*.bara.sky linguist-language=Starlark

This tells GitHub’s Linguist to treat .bara.sky files as Starlark, enabling Python-like syntax highlighting.

After Adding .gitattributes

Your Copybara config now renders with proper highlighting:

# Highlighted - much easier to read
core.workflow(
    name = "default",
    origin = git.origin(url = "https://github.com/example/source"),
    destination = git.destination(url = "https://github.com/example/dest"),
    origin_files = glob(["src/**"]),
    authoring = authoring.pass_thru("Bot <bot@example.com>"),
)

Important Notes

Caching Behavior

GitHub caches syntax highlighting per file blob. If highlighting doesn’t appear immediately:

Make a small change to the .bara.sky file
Commit both files together
The cache will refresh with the new blob

Other Useful Overrides

You can add multiple rules to .gitattributes:

# Copybara configs
*.bara.sky linguist-language=Starlark

# Bazel files (if not auto-detected)
BUILD linguist-language=Starlark
*.bzl linguist-language=Starlark
WORKSPACE linguist-language=Starlark

# Mark generated files (excluded from stats)
generated/** linguist-generated=true

# Mark vendor files (excluded from stats)
vendor/** linguist-vendored=true

Editor Support

VS Code

Install the Starlark extension and add to your settings:

{
  "files.associations": {
    "*.bara.sky": "starlark",
    "copy.bara.sky": "starlark"
  }
}

JetBrains IDEs

The Bazel plugin includes Starlark support. Associate the file pattern:

Go to Settings → Editor → File Types
Find Starlark or Bazel BUILD
Add *.bara.sky pattern

Vim/Neovim

Add to your config:

" .vimrc or init.vim
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.bara.sky set filetype=python

Or for proper Starlark support, use vim-starlark.

Emacs

;; init.el
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.bara\\.sky\\'" . python-mode))

Language Stats

The linguist-language override also affects your repository’s language statistics bar. If you have many .bara.sky files, they’ll now count as Starlark instead of being unrecognized.