MDeps is a simple command line tool which inspects your source code and returns the dependencies between your modules/classes etc.
MDeps is currently used for ELM projects but should work with Java etc as well (as long as one dependency can be identified by one regular expression).
We're using MDeps for creating a diagram to show the main components of our project/source code and how they interact with each other. This is important to identify archtetural design flaws.
Basically you have to define five settings:
Usually your modules/packages might be nested e.g.
Pages.SearchPage.Foo Pages.SearchPage.Bar.Baz
Use flag -n 2 to limit the depth of your components to 2. This will collapse the dependencies to
Pages.SearchPage
Especially for 3rd party libs your not really interested in detail which module/package is used. You only want to show that there is a dependency to the lib at a whole. Therefor you can specify a regex which will replace the module/package name with something shorter:
The regex has the following format:
--replaceDependencyRegEx="replacement_1!!!regex_1@@@replacement_2!!!regex_2"
You can define multiple replacements separated by "@@@".
Each replacement you have to define what a match is replaced with and a regex to find the match (separated by !!!).
E.g.
--replaceDependencyRegEx="Html!!!^(Html)@@@Json!!!^(Json)"
In this regex we replace all Html.Fooo and Html.Bar with Html and all Json.xxx with Json.
The replacement always wins over the Depth param (see above).
Usually you're not interested in dependencies to core libs of you language. Use --ignoreDependencyRegEx="^(Dict)|^(String)|^(Time)|^(Regex)|^(Maybe)|^(Array)"
Use -e ".elm" to specify the file filter for your source files.
If not specified you'll get something like
module1
---> module1_dependency1
---> module1_dependency2
module2
---> module2_dependency1
---> module2_dependency2
If -d specified you'll get a .dot format (GraphViz) which can be used to create a svg-image.
Use the Makefile example to grep your dependencies: e.g.
make source=/Users/flg/code/humio/ui/src/elm | grep -E "\"Pages.* -> \"_Json"
Will find all pages modules which are using some Json Libraries - which is in our case not a good thing because that should be encapsulated by the api modules...
This tool is written in go so download and install it via go install.