Make it work without installation

[gentlee]

Would be nice to just call:

npx dependency-cruiser src

to show the graph, without the need of installing anything.

Context

I don't want to install and then remove this package if I want it to be used once.

Expected Behavior

Just run npx dependency-cruiser src and get graph

Current Behavior

Need to do installation steps then remove it.

[sverweij]

Hi @gentlee thanks for the suggestion.

dependency-cruiser's primary use case is to run it as part of a permanent setup. Besides, running it as a one-off with e.g. npx comes with some complications:

• For TypeScript (Vue, Svelte, CoffeeScript, ...) projects you will need the appropriate transpilers. By design dependency-cruiser does not ship these because (1) whatever it ships it will in almost all cases be a different version as you're actually using, resulting in subtle or not-so-subtle issues (2) shipping all these compilers will make dependency-cruiser's installed/ download size huge (3) it'll for sure ship compilers you don't use too (e.g. if you use vue, the svelte compiler will be dead weight).
• As there's close to zero standardization in JavaScript land there's a Gödelset of ways to decide where to find modules (think tsconfig paths, babel and webpack aliases, workspaces, subpath imports, ...) some of which will need configuration. Dependency-cruiser's --init will detect most of these for you and save them in a configuration file.

That said even with these complication it's possible to run dependency-cruiser with npx

• For JavaScript-only projects without any path re-mapping tomfoolery this typically works out of the box already (with some caveats)
• For other projects you'd can pass the compilers you need as arguments to npx.
• Locations of configurations (babel, webpack, typescript configurations) you can pass as arguments to dependency-cruiser.

Mileage may vary, though.

Some examples:

# list all dependencies in src in text format
npx --package typescript --package dependency-cruiser -- \
    depcruise src --no-config --include-only ^src --ts-config tsconfig.json --output-type text
# npx will ask if it's OK to install typescript and dependency-cruiser; 
# hit enter to confirm

# list all dependencies in src and use the experimental 
# x-dot-webpage reporter to generate a webpage with a graph 
# of the dependencies with the native graphviz' dot
# command  + show  it  in the  browser with the `browser` command/ script
npx --package typescript --package dependency-cruiser -- \
    depcruise src --no-config --include-only ^src --ts-config tsconfig.json --output-type x-dot-webpage > dependencies.html

[github-actions[bot]]

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