dependency-cruiser

What is dependency-cruiser?

dependency-cruiser is a tool to analyze and visualize the dependencies in your JavaScript and TypeScript projects. It helps you understand the structure of your codebase, identify potential issues, and enforce architectural rules.

What are dependency-cruiser's main functionalities?

Dependency Graph Generation

Generates a dependency graph for the specified source directory. This helps in visualizing the dependencies between different modules in your project.

const depCruiser = require('dependency-cruiser');
const result = depCruiser.cruise(['src']);
console.log(result.output);

Enforcing Architectural Rules

Allows you to define and enforce architectural rules, such as preventing circular dependencies. This helps maintain a clean and manageable codebase.

const depCruiser = require('dependency-cruiser');
const config = {
  forbidden: [
    {
      name: 'no-circular',
      severity: 'error',
      comment: 'Circular dependencies are not allowed',
      from: {},
      to: {
        circular: true
      }
    }
  ]
};
const result = depCruiser.cruise(['src'], config);
console.log(result.output);

Reporting

Generates reports in various formats (e.g., JSON, HTML) to help you analyze the dependency structure and identify potential issues.

const depCruiser = require('dependency-cruiser');
const result = depCruiser.cruise(['src'], {}, { outputType: 'json' });
console.log(JSON.stringify(result.output, null, 2));

Other packages similar to dependency-cruiser

madge

Madge is a JavaScript library that visualizes the module dependency graph of your project. It can detect circular dependencies and generate visual graphs. Compared to dependency-cruiser, Madge is more focused on visualization and less on enforcing architectural rules.

depcheck

Depcheck is a tool that helps you find unused dependencies in your project. While it doesn't provide the same level of dependency graph visualization as dependency-cruiser, it is useful for cleaning up your package.json file by identifying dependencies that are no longer in use.

webpack-bundle-analyzer

Webpack Bundle Analyzer is a tool that visualizes the size of webpack output files with an interactive zoomable treemap. It is more focused on analyzing the size and composition of your webpack bundles rather than the dependency structure of your source code.

README

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 (detecting circular dependencies, dependencies missing in package.json, production code relying on dev- or optionalDependencies, ...).

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
• You can find the --init-rules set here

Report them

depcruise --validate .dependency-cruiser.json src

This will validate aginst 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
  • Adding other output formats
• 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 :metal: in Holland.