dependency-cruiser VS workload-discovery-on-aws

With dependency-cruiser, you can enforce which imports are allowed. This enables you to create an architecture fitness function that ensures your code continues to adhere to the initial design. You can also visualize your dependencies to gain a clearer understanding of your code's actual structure, allowing you to compare it with your mental model and make improvements where necessary.

something like https://github.com/sverweij/dependency-cruiser maybe https://github.com/pahen/madge or https://github.com/antoine-coulon/skott

I've personally fallen in love with Dependency Cruiser, which lets you set any arbitrary import rules you want on your repository. With it, you can enforce common things, like, "You can only import through the index file, if one exists", but you can also make custom-tailored rules for your specific project. For example, maybe your project is divided into three large folders - folder1 is allowed to import from folder2 and folder3, folder2 can import from folder3, and folder3 can not import from anyone else. Well, you can enforce that too, or whatever you need.

Dependency Cruiser works great, can even render visuals:

https://github.com/sverweij/dependency-cruiser

NX[0] also has logic for handling this issue

[0]: https://nx.dev/

I have a dependency-cruiser script that enforces codebase import rules, which I want checked on each dev hot-reload build and prod build.

Great project!

One feature request: Running the npx command searched only for the js files, not for the ts files. When I built deprank locally with yarn, it also showed the ts files. After looking at dependency-cruiser figure it has to do with what typescript compilers are available where.

It would be great if the npx command you provide in your readme would work regardless of my local setup - dependency-cruiser has documentation and one example of a suitable npx command here: https://github.com/sverweij/dependency-cruiser/blob/develop/...

My suggestion would be to check if any ts file is part of the extension option (i.e. --ext=".js,.jsx, .ts, .tsx") and only then do the magic needed to also show ts files.

The first step is to install dependency-cruiser.

You may have a look at dependency cruiser.

Workload Discovery on AWS has recently released a new version - would that work for you?

It's interpreted line-by-line so that each line represents one state of the diagram. There are commands to delete nodes: when I delete a node I just remove it from its parent but leave it in the top-level state. That has the neat effect that if I re-add it, I get the node with all its descendents and connections restored in one step, which I can use to pre-diagram things I talk about often.

After calculating the drawing state by applying all the commands from the start to the current selection, the next step is to limit this to the visible pieces. I make a copy of the drawing state, starting from the currently zoomed node and following all children. Then I add all connections, if all the 'to' ends of the connections are visible.

Next, I do layout. Starting with the visible tree, annotate all nodes with positions of the box (if any), the icon, and the label. The diagrams I'm drawing are similar to those produced by AWS Perspective: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/aws-perspec... , so if a node has no children I draw it as a large icon with a label below, if it has children, it is a box with a small icon to the top left, a centred label at the top. Each node can choose one of a small number of layouts that I can do automatically with just a list of children: 'ring' (a circle of nodes), 'row', 'column', or 'snake' (the default: alternate rtl-ltr rows to evenly fill the space; this will be a grid if that fits or could end up like 4-3-4-3 if it doesn't). In ring & snake, boxes are always 4:3; in row and column they are stretched to fit.

Next, I do animation. I keep around the previous layed-out state, and use window.requestAnimationFrame to calculate the position of boxes between the start and end state. A box that is in both start and end states is moved, if it is only in start or end I fade it in or out as need be. This lets me animate between _any_ two states of the drawing, so I can talk about one bit of the diagram, then jump back and forth by clicking in the command window, and it smoothly animates between them. I found animating for just 0.5s worked best for interactivity; it's nice to see a slower move but it feels laggy when typing.

I calculate arrow positions after calculating the final position of boxes and icons. I chose to use circular arcs, because you will never get an awkward situation where an arc lies directly along the edge of a box; straight things are always boxes, curvy things are always arrows. SVG wants two endpoints and a centre to draw these. So, I start with an arc between the centres of the two boxes, choose a radius twice as long as the distance between these points; then I calculate the intersection of the arc with the boxes, and use those two intersection points as the start/end of the arc. (this isn't that difficult, the formula for the arc is in the svg spec, and it's checking 4 straight lines, choose the intersection point closest to the other box). Like the boxes, the arrows fade in and out if they are not needed in one of the start or end states.

All of this then just replaces the content of the svg. It's surprisingly smooth.

One last detail is icons. I'm using the icons from mingrammer (https://github.com/mingrammer/diagrams/tree/master/resources), which gives me about 1600(!). Finding an icon _while you type_ is awkward and initially I had to drop to the shell to find the file I was going to refer to. I tried giving the drawing tool a mode that would let me visually pick the icon, but 1600 is too many. So I changed it to use a fuzzy search to find an appropriate icon: it looks for the icon where the sequence of characters appear in the shortest substring of the icon path: eg for 'ec2' it constructs the regex `.(e.?c.*?2)`, scoring the matching substring 'ec2' better than 'elastic2', and the shorter containing string 'aws/compute/ec2' better than eg 'aws/compute/ec2-rounded'. (I have a further round of preferences so that the top level aws iconset is preferred to eg the ibm one, which has terrible icons). This gives you an icon for almost anything you type, and encourages a more playful approach to picking the icon than the exact-match approach.

There's a bit more to it, I also accept some markdown which fades from the diagram to slides with bullet points, then back to the diagram if the current command is a diagramming command. But the description above is most of it. I could probably have done this better with eg d3 to do the drawing but I am not a front end developer at all and the whole thing was more of a hack over a couple of weekends. I should clean it up a bit, but it works.

I serve up pre-prepared pages with this js attached from github pages, I can walk through eg the flow of data clicking the down arrow to change the selection which causes it to animate to the next state which has the next arrow... and so on.

AWS has a solution called AWS Perspective that will do exactly this. The solution itself is free and open source, you only pay for the resources it creates. You can also export the diagrams to draw.io if you want to edit them manually. Also, it will show you how much your solution(s) and each of its components is costing you.

Check out - https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/aws-perspective/