Dependency cruiser

Validate and visualize dependencies. With your rules. JavaScript. TypeScript. CoffeeScript. ES6, CommonJS, AMD.

What's this do?

This runs through the dependencies in any JavaScript, TypeScript, LiveScript or CoffeeScript project and ...

• ... validates them against (your own) rules
• ... reports violated rules
  • in text (for your builds)
  • in graphics (for your eyeballs)

As a side effect it can generate cool dependency graphs you can stick on the wall to impress your grandma.

How do I use it?

Install it

• npm install --save-dev dependency-cruiser to use it as a validator in your project or...
• npm install --global dependency-cruiser if you just want to to inspect multiple projects.

Show stuff to your grandma

To create a graph of the dependencies in your src folder, you'd run dependency cruiser with output type dot and run GraphViz dot on the result. In a one liner:

depcruise --exclude "^node_modules" --output-type dot src | dot -T svg > dependencygraph.svg

• You can read more about what you can do with --exclude and other command line options in the command line interface documentation.
• Real world samples contains dependency cruises of some of the most used projects on npm.

Validate things

Declare some rules

The easy way to get you started:

depcruise --init-rules

This will create a .dependency-cruiser.json with some rules that make sense in most projects. Start adding your rules by tweaking that file.

Sample rule:

{
    "forbidden": [{
        "name": "not-to-test",
        "comment": "don't allow dependencies from outside the test folder to test",
        "severity": "error",
        "from": { "pathNot": "^test" },
        "to": { "path": "^test" }
    }]
}

• To read more about writing rules check the writing rules tutorial or the rules reference
• There is practical rules configuration to get you started here

Report them

depcruise --validate .dependency-cruiser.json src

This will validate your rules and shows any violations in an eslint-like format:

There's more ways to report validations; in a graph (like the one on top of this readme) or in a table.

• Read more about the err, dot, csv and html reporters in the command line interface documentation.
• dependency-cruiser uses itself to check on itself in its own build process; see the dependency-cruise target in the Makefile

I want to know more!

You've come to the right place :-) :

• Usage
  • Command line reference
  • Writing rules
  • Rules reference
• Hacking on dependency-cruiser
  • API
  • Output format
  • Adding support for other alt-js languages
• Other things
  • Road map
  • Real world show cases
  • TypeScript, CoffeeScript and LiveScript support

License

MIT

Thanks

• Marijn Haverbeke and other people who colaborated on acorn - the excelent javascript parser dependency-cruiser uses to infer dependencies.

Build status

Made with 🤘 in Holland.