cli.md

dependency-cruiser command line interface

Running with no parameters gets you help:

  Usage: dependency-cruise [options] <files-or-directories>

  Options:

    -h, --help                output usage information
    -V, --version             output the version number
    -v, --validate [file]     validate with rules in [file]
                              (default: .dependency-cruiser.json)
    -f, --output-to <file>    file to write output to; - for stdout
                              (default: -)
    -x, --exclude <regex>     a regular expression for excluding modules
    -M, --system <items>      list of module systems (default: amd,cjs,es6)
    -T, --output-type <type>  output type - html|dot|err|json
                              (default:json)
    -P --prefix <prefix>      prefix to prepend links with (e.g. in the
                              svg output type)

Output formats

err

For use in build scripts, in combination with --validate e.g.

dependency-cruise -T err --validate my-depcruise-rules.json src

This will:

• ... print nothing and exit with code 0 if dependency-cruiser didn't find any violations of the rules in .dependency-cruiser.json.
• ... print the violating dependencies if there is any. Moreover it will exit with exit code number of violations found in the same fasion linters and test tools do.

See the dependency-cruise target in the Makefile for a real world example.

dot

Supplying dot as output type will make dependency-cruiser write a GraphViz dot format directed graph. Typical use is in concert with GraphViz dot:

dependency-cruise -x "^node_modules" -T dot src | dot -T svg > dependencygraph.svg

html

Write it to html with a dependency matrix instead:

dependency-cruise -T html -f dependencies.html src

csv

If you supply csv it will write the dependency matrix to a comma separated file - so you can import it into a spreadsheet program and analyze from there.

--exclude: exclude modules from being cruised

If you don't want to see certain modules in your report (or not have them validated), you can exclude them by passing a regular expression to the --exclude (short: -x) option. E.g. to exclude node_modules from being scanned:

dependency-cruise -x "node_modules" -T html -f deps-without-node_modules.html src

Beacuse it's regular expressions, you can do more interesting stuff here as well. To exclude all modules with a file path starting with coverage, test or node_modules, you could do this:

dependency-cruise -x "^(coverage|test|node_modules)" -T html -f deps-without-stuffs.html src

--validate

Validates against a list of rules in a rules file. This defaults to a file called .dependency-cruiser.json, but you can specify your own rules file.

dependency-cruise -T err -x node_modules --validate my.rules.json

The file specifies a bunch of regular expressions pairs your dependencies should adhere to.

A simple validation configuration that forbids modules in src to use stuff in the test folder and allows everything else:

{
    "forbidden": [{
        "from": {"path": "^src"},
        "to": {"path": "^test"}
    }]
}

You can optionally specify a name and an error severity ('error', 'warn' (the default) and 'info') with them that will appear in some reporters:

{
    "forbidden": [{
        "name": "no-src-to-test",
        "severity": "error",
        "from": {"path": "^src"},
        "to": {"path": "^test"}
    }]
}

--prefix prefixing links

With this you can pass a 'prefix' so you can have links to other places than the one you used to cruise the dependencies).

If you want the links in the svg output to have a prefix (say, https://github.com/you/yourrepo/tree/master/) so when you click them you'll open the link on github instead of the local file - pass that after the --prefix option.

depcruise --prefix https://github.com/sverweij/dependency-cruiser/tree/develop/ -T dot -x node_modules src | dot -T svg > dependencies.svg

Cruising multiple files and directories in one go

Just pass them as arguments. This, e.g. will cruise every file in the folders src, test and lib (recursively)+ the file called index.ts in the root.

depcruise --output-type dot src test lib index.ts

Daphne's dependencies - a gentle introduction

Daphne's dependencies sport a visual overview of all the output formats. It also shows how Daphne and her colleagues use them in their workflow.