iota

iota (Inter-dependency Objective Testing Apparatus) is a tool to enforce clean separation of responsibilities in Erlang code

API declarations

A module can be declared as an API module for an application (meaning it's a module other applications should invoke for functionality) in two ways.

You can explicitly declare the entire module as an API:

-api(all). %% Declares all exported functions as part of the module's API.

or you can declare which exported functions are part of the API:

-export([ foo/1, bar/0 ]).
-api([ foo/1 ]). %% Declares only foo/1 as part of the module's API.

Declaring the API functions implicitly declares the module as an API module, and only declaring the module as an API module implicitly declares all exported functions as part of the API.

If the module declares all its exported functions as part of its API, iota will emit a warning.

Additionally, iota will emit warnings if you declare unexported functions as part of your API, and errors if any application calls non-API functions in modules belonging to other applications.

Intra-application function calls are accepted regardless if they are declared as API or not.

Running iota

You can run iota simply by doing (all examples use the applications provided in priv):

$ make escriptize
$ make examples
$ ./iota check priv/test_app1
ERROR: test_app2_mod:baz/0 calls non-API function test_app1_mod:xpto/2

ERROR: test_app1_mod:foo/0 calls non-API module test_app2_mod

===== iota report =====
{test_app1_mod,foo,0} - Errors: 1, Warnings: 0
{test_app2_mod,baz,0} - Errors: 1, Warnings: 0
=======================
Total - Errors:2 Warnings:0

Please note that your application must be compiled before, as iota uses xref for the more meaningful checks and your declarations need to be baked in as well. :)

You can also ask iota to describe the API of all applications on the given path for you:

$ ./iota describe_api priv/test_app1
===== iota report =====
API for test_app1:
  [{test_app1_mod,xpto,1}]
API for test_app2:
  []

Whitelisting applications

It's possible to whitelist applications from the checks, for applications that do not and will not have iota annotations (e.g. third-party libraries).

To do so, in the root of your top-level application, create a iota.config file and include the following:

{ignore_apps, [app1, app2]}.

where [app1, app2] are the applications you wish to whitelist.

Setting library path

In your iota.config file, use the following to set your library path:

{lib_dirs, ["deps"]}.

If not set, lib_dirs defaults to /path/to/app/lib.

Future work

• Add support for more kinds of checking (e.g. layer checks through external declarations)
• Plugins for various tools (e.g. rebar, EDTS)

NOTE

When running make test you'll see that the coverage of some modules is very low. This is due to the use of moka for mocking.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Samuel Rivas for moka and the nice Dialyzer scripts, and Håkan Nilsson for docopt-erl.