Awesome
CodeViz
Visualize code dependencies in your C/C++ projects.
codeviz
is a super simple, cross-platform, python script that only uses
built-in libraries to create code dependency graphs of your source files.
It works like this:
- Find the source files and parse them to get their headers.
- Create a
dot
file that describes the code graph. - Pass the
dot
file intographviz
, which will create a visual graphic of your code dependencies.
Installation
1. Install Graphviz
codeviz
uses graphviz to create the visual map.
Follow the graphviz installation instructions for your platform:
Once graphviz is installed, ensure that it is available in your environment.
2. Install CodeViz
There are a several ways you can install codeviz
.
Option A: Just copying the script to your executable path
For example, if you have ~/bin
mapped to your environment's path:
$ git clone https://github.com/jmarkowski/codeviz.git
$ cp codeviz/codeviz.py ~/bin/codeviz
Option B: Using setup
To install codeviz
into your system path:
$ git clone https://github.com/jmarkowski/codeviz.git
$ cd codeviz
$ sudo python3 setup.py install
The generated install-record.txt
file will list the paths of files that were
installed on your system.
Option C: In a virtual environment with pip
First, build the distribution package:
$ git clone https://github.com/jmarkowski/codeviz.git
$ python setup.py sdist
Next, create and start a virtual environment:
$ virtualenv pyenv
$ source pyenv/bin/activate
Finally, install the package:
$ pip install dist/codeviz*
Now, while in the virtual environment, you'll have the codeviz
command in your
path.
Example
The image below shows the result of generating the visual code map for the
original git source at hash e83c516
.
Usage
General
Run codeviz
with a path to your source directory to search for source & header
files in the given path:
$ codeviz path/to/src
Specify multiple code paths, mixing directories and files:
$ codeviz path/to/src/subdir1 path/to/src/subdir2 path/to/src/subdir3/*.h
Search directories recursively:
$ codeviz -r path/to/src
Ignore certain files and directories from being used:
# Ignore tests
$ codeviz -r src/ --ignore=src/unit-tests/* --ignore=src/test
Limit the source files to those with certain headers:
# Any source files that do not include the a.h and b.h headers are ignored.
$ codeviz *.cpp a.h b.h --must-include
Style Options
If you want a black and white version of the generated dependency graph:
$ codeviz --no-color path/to/src
If you wish to highlight particular files in the graph, you may do so:
$ codeviz src/ --highlight src/foo*.cpp
Format Options
You can specify the name of an output file with a variety of output formats.
$ codeviz path/to/src -o jpeg-file.jpg
$ codeviz path/to/src -o postscript-file.ps
$ codeviz path/to/src -o png-file.png
See here for a complete list of supported file formats.
Limitations
-
System header files (e.g. stdio.h) are ignored and not referenced. This is intentional as it's presumed that you only care about dependencies of your source code.
-
Because
codeviz
does not know anything about your build system and it's include paths, there may be "dependency collisions" if it finds multiple header files in separate directories that share the same filename. However,codeviz
will warn you if such collisions occur and still show the dependencies in dotted lines labeled with a?
. You can resolve these collisions yourself by modifying the contents of the outputteddot
file. -
For very, very large codebases, the
graphviz
tool may fail to create the graphic. In such cases, you're better off specifying a smaller subset of paths within the codebase that you're really interested in.