Not a bug or a feature: Programmatic API for unit testing architecture

[pbadenski]

I'm toying with an idea of unit testing our design using mocha (influenced by Java's ArchUnit: https://www.archunit.org/getting-started) - as an alternative to using declarative dependencies/validation configuration.

API documentation mentions programmatic access, but doesn't really give enough context to build an efficient mocha test suite. One of my requirements would be that generating dependency graph and then defining and applying rules would ideally be separate API calls. Eg.:

const depcruise = require("dependency-cruiser").cruise;

const dependencies = depcruise(["src"]).output;

const rule = buildRule({ forbidden: { ... }}).

rule.validateAgainst(dependencies);

Is it something that's possible at the moment or would it require extensions to the programmatic API?

[sverweij]

hi @pbadenski that's an interesting idea. As you already correctly surmised this is currently not possible with the API. But it shouldn't be too hard to expose some of dc's innards to make it possible. If I have some time later this week I'll see if I can whip up a first iteration to gauge feasibility.

[pbadenski]

Thanks, I've used existing output to quickly custom hack a few assertions we needed. We're now running dependency cruiser with mocha - just thought I'll share this with you :)