Distributed tensorflow fails with "BUILD file not found on package"

Question

When attempting to build in the core/distributed_runtime module using:

$ bazel build -c opt 
   //tensorflow/core/distributed_runtime/rpc:grpc_tensorflow_server

We get the following error:

ERROR: error loading package 'tensorflow/core/distributed_runtime/rpc': 
Extension file not found. Unable to load package for
   '//google/protobuf:protobuf.bzl': BUILD file not found on package path.
INFO: Elapsed time: 0.097s

Are there additional steps required (and not mentioned in the README.md) ?

Answer 1

This sounds like a git submodule issue—and it would affect building any part of TensorFlow from source. To recover, run the following command in your git repository:

$ git submodule update --init --recursive

(There are many other ways to do the same thing: see this question for some suggestions.)