CLI tool?

[piranna]

Is there any way to use this as a headless CLI tool? Provide a package.json file as argument, and get the SVG content in stdout.

[piranna]

Is being done the rendering server side? If so, it could be done with just a single fetch() request...

[broofa]

This is not something I've designed for so, no, there's no simple way to render graphs on the server at the moment.

It might be possible to generate graphs with puppeteer, but I haven't explored that.

The core SVG is created by generating a DOT document and running that through graphviz. So another option would be to write a script to do something similar and then call into one of the many availalbe language APIs for graphviz to generate the diagram. But NPMGraph also does direct DOM manipulation of the SVG graph for selection, colorizing, and other other view-related behavior, so this approach wouldn't capture those aspects of the graph.

[broofa]

@piranna Have you looked at https://www.npmjs.com/package/madge? 'Would be curious to hear your thoughts on how that tool does/doesn't overlap with what a headless npmgraph might provide.

[piranna]

@piranna Have you looked at npmjs.com/package/madge? 'Would be curious to hear your thoughts on how that tool does/doesn't overlap with what a headless npmgraph might provide.

Yes, in fact I'm using it :-) It generates the graph at modules level, not at packages level. For me it's useful to detect circular references in complex code bases that can lead to bugs.

[broofa]

FWIW, I've just published the first version of the npmgraph CLI. It's not what you're asking for here, but may still be of interest. It's basically a fancy URL-opener for now.