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Documentation

dg-query is a command-line utility program to query dependency graph of a codebase. It operates on the adjacency lists data stored as a JSON file. Note that this is not a graph library; for advanced graph manipulation and analysis, networkx would be a great choice.

The tool is written in Go, built with Bazel, and runs its CI in Buildkite.

Dependency graph

The dg-query is intended to be used to work primarily with the snapshot of the dependency graph of a codebase, with every build target mapped to an array of its direct dependencies e.g.

{
    "src/app/main.py": [
        "src/shared/utils.py", 
        "src/shared/process.py"
    ],
    "src/lib/project.py": [
        "src/lib/internal/billing/invoice.py", 
        "src/lib/internal/rpc/process.py"
    ]
}

If you don't have a sophisticated build system, this kind of data should still be possible to obtain by hacking together some scripts to statically analyze your import statements iteratively building the adjacency lists.

If you use an artifact based build system such as Pants or Bazel, exporting the dependency graph is trivial, but may still require some post-processing such as omitting irrelevant subsets of the graph or renaming some build targets for clarity.

Pants (see command-line reference):

$ pants dependencies --format=json :: > dg.json

Bazel (see Querying dependency graph of a Bazel project):

$ bazel query 'deps(//...)' --output=graph --noimplicit_deps > graph.dot
# convert dot file to JSON

Build systems allow exporting data about the reverse dependencies (aka dependents), but this is not required for the dg-query as it operates solely on the dependencies lists.

Features

The tool serves as a faster way to query the dependency graph of a project. This is because the targets and their relationships are materialized so there's no need for any kind of runtime evaluation. The downside is that you need to re-export your dependency graph data every time a change that leads to changes in the dependency graph is made.

dg-query has a ton of functionality grouped under individual commands:

dependencies (deps)

Identify dependencies of given node(s), optionally transitively (--transitive).

Options:

  • specify depth when searching for dependencies transitively (--depth)
  • include the build target itself in the output (--reflexive)

dependents (rdeps)

Identify dependents of given node(s), optionally transitively (--transitive).

Options:

  • specify depth when searching for dependents transitively (--depth)
  • include the build target itself in the output (--reflexive)

paths

Get paths between individual targets.

Options:

  • --from and --to targets to find paths between
  • --n limits the number of paths returned (helpful with a large graph)

metrics

Get dependency graph related metrics. A dependency graph (--dg) may be used, or a reverse dependency graph (--rdg) may be used, if you have one.

Metrics:

  • dependency count (optionally, transitively)
  • dependent count (optionally, transitively)