dependo

Visualize your CommonJS, AMD, or ES6 module dependencies in a force directed graph report - powered by D3.js.

Introduction

Let me introduce dependo - A small visualization tool that draws an force directed graph of JavaScript dependencies pulled from a codebase of CommonJS, AMD, or ES6. Behind the scene I’m using a wonderful library named node-madge, to extract the dependencies and combined with the power of D3.js I draw a beautiful zoomable directed graph.

You can read the full introduction to the project in my blog post.

Features

• Draw a graph of nodes, where each module is represented as a node.
• Google Maps's like zooming, dragging and panning.
• Connect nodes with it's dependencies via lines.
• Hovering a node will highlight it's direct dependencies.
• It's possible to drag a node to a specific position, to re-layout the graph.

Report example

The best way to show something is by example, so here I generated a graph of the official RequireJS multipage example:

See the example here: http://auchenberg.github.com/dependo/example

Installation

To install as a library:

$ npm install dependo

To install the command-line tool:

$ sudo npm -g install dependo

Options

{
    'format': The module format to expect, 'cjs', 'amd', 'es6', or 'json'. AMD (amd) is the default format. If 'json', pass a file formatted like `example.json` in the `example/` directory.
    'optimized': Boolean, True if the parser should read modules from a optimized file (r.js). Defaults to false.
    'exclude': String from which a regex will be constructed for excluding files from the scan.
    'mainRequireModule': Name of the module if parsing an optimized file (r.js), where the main file used require() instead of define. Defaults to ''.
    'requireConfig': Path to RequireJS config used to find shim dependencies and path aliases. Not used by default.
    'reverse': Reverse dependency arrow directions.
    'title': The title of the generated HTML document.
}

API

  var Dependo = require('dependo');

  // Fire up an dependo instance
  var dependo = new Dependo(src, {
    format: 'amd',
    requireConfig: 'optional path to RequireJS config file',
    exclude: '^node_modules',
    transform: function(dep){
        //Apply a transformation on dependencies
        ....

        return dep;

    }
  });

  dependo.generateHtml();
  ...

CLI

Usage: dependo [options] <file|dir ...>

Options:

  -h, --help             output usage information
  -V, --version          output the version number
  -f, --format <name>    format to parse (amd/cjs/es6/json)
  -x, --exclude <regex>  a regular expression for excluding modules
  -t, --title <title>    the title of the generated document (dependo)
  -v, --reverse          reverse direction of arrows

Generate HTML report of all module dependencies (AMD), and save it to /example/report.html

$ dependo -f amd /path/src > example/report.html

Grunt

I also wrote a grunt-task that can be found in this separate repository: https://github.com/auchenberg/grunt-dependo

Roadmap

dependo is still very much in progress, so here is the todo-list:

• Proper label positioning: Avoid label collisions and make the graph more readable.
• Testing! Unit tests of D3 render logic, and the grunt-task itself

Thanks to

This project wouldn't have been possible without the great work on node-madge by Patrik Henningson, or wonderful D3.js library.

Inspiration

http://bl.ocks.org/1153292