Deptrac

Deptrac is a static code analysis tool for PHP that helps you communicate, visualize and enforce architectural decisions in your projects. You can freely define your architectural layers over classes and which rules should apply to them.

For example, you can use Deptrac to ensure that bundles/modules/extensions in your project are truly independent of each other to make them easier to reuse.

Deptrac can be used in a CI pipeline to make sure a pull request does not violate any of the architectural rules you defined. With the optional Graphviz formatter you can visualize your layers, rules and violations.

Documentation

You can find the documentation in the /docs directory or visit the doc page: https://qossmic.github.io/deptrac

Getting Started

You can install Deptrac via Composer. We recommend using the deptrac-shim package for this:

$ composer require --dev qossmic/deptrac-shim

Alternatively, you can also use PHIVE or download the PHAR attached to each release on GitHub. We strongly advise against using the deptrac package directly as a composer dependency. We update dependencies regularly, which might cause disruptions in your project.

Once you have downloaded/installed deptrac, you will need to create a configuration file, where you define your layers and communication ruleset. This configuration file is written in YAML and, by default, is stored with the name deptrac.yaml in your project’s root directory.

Deptrac can generate a template for you, using the init command.

vendor/bin/deptrac init

When you have this file, you can analyse your code by running the analyse command:

vendor/bin/deptrac

# which is equivalent to
vendor/bin/deptrac analyse --config-file=deptrac.yaml

In order to run Deptrac you need at least PHP 8.1.

You can analyse projects that require an older PHP version as long as nikic/php-parser can parse it.

Further Documentation

• Backwards Compatibility - General info on how we approach backwards compatibility
• Upgrade Guide - List of backwards breaking changes that need to be addressed when upgrading Deptrac to a new version and how to do it.
• Core Concepts - Explains layers, rules and violations in more details.
• Configuration - Reference for all available settings in a depfile
• Collectors - Reference for which collectors are available in Deptrac to define your layers.
• Formatters - Lists the different output formats supported by Deptrac
• Debugging - Overview of the debug commands
• Code Of Conduct - Our community standards
• Contribute - Advice for contributing code changes, e.g. how to run tests or how to build a phar file with your changes that you can use to analyse your projects
• Security Guide - How to report security vulnerabilities