-f pathToInsulationFile: optional, the file which defines the allowed dependencies. This defaults to .insulation.json within the passed -d directory. See the Insulation File section below for more details on formatting.

Example:

# defaults to reading ./.insulation.json
insulate

insulate -f src/.insulation.json

A useful place to run this command would be in a pre-commit, pre-push, pre-merge, or pre-publish hook that runs tests or linters, etc.

See the test dir in the github repo for a couple example usages.

Insulation file

The Insulation file must be a JSON file. The structure follows that specified below. If a dirPath is in the imports object that doesn't exist, the Insulation is considered invalid and the command will error. Any other configuration not matching the structure below will also result in errors.

Insulation file structure

{
    imports?: {
        [dirPath: string]: {
            allow?: string[];
            block?: string[];
        };
    };
    checkDirectory?: string;
    options?: Options;
    silent?: boolean;
};

allow: is a list of paths that the given dirPath can import from. If this is an empty array, dirPath isn't allowed to import from anything except itself. If this property is not defined, every import is allowed unless blocked by the block property.
block: is a list of paths to explicitly block the given dirPath from importing. Any of these paths can be a child of an allowed path and it'll work just as you'd expect (allowing the parent path but blocking the child path). If this array is empty or this property is not defined, nothing is blocked. block takes precedence over allow. This means that if the same path is both blocked and allowed, it will be considered a block and the Insulation check will fail if imports occur from it.
checkDirectory: is a path to the directory which contains the folders to check. Only paths that are explicitly declared in the Insulation file are checked. This defaults to the current directory.
options: are a list of options to be passed directly into the dependency-cruiser package, which this uses. See that package's README for documentation on options.

Both allow and block paths are relative to the directory that is being checked, checkDirectory.

Simple example:

a can only import from b. b can import from anything except a.

{
    "imports": {
        "a": {
            "allow": ["b"]
        },
        "b": {
            "block": ["a"]
        }
    }
}

Real life example Insulation file

In the following example, folders back-end and front-end are allowed to import from common but not from each other (or anything else for that matter). Also note that because common's allow property is an empty array, it is not allowed to import from anything.

Because checkDirectory is also included, all these folder paths are relative to that directory, or ./src.

{
    "checkDirectory": "./src",
    "imports": {
        "back-end": {"allow": ["common"]},
        "common": {"allow": []},
        "front-end": {"allow": ["common"]}
    }
}