New Package: Django Dependency Map

I have recently been reading Swizec Teller's new book Scaling Fast and in it he mentions architectural complexity, which reminded me of my desire for a tool that combines database dependencies between Django apps and import dependencies between Django apps. To date, I have used other tools such as graph models from Django extensions, import-linter is the most recent one, and pyreverse from Pylint. They all do bits of the job, but require manual stitching together to get a cohesive graph of everything overlaid in the right way. So I remembered about this, and so over the last couple of days, I've built a new package which combines all of this into a live view which updates as you build your app, a management command and a panel for Debug Toolbar.

Why the Django app level, you ask? Primarily, I do find models good, but they can get a little too complicated and a little you get a few too many lines and doing imports at the module level within an app or like separating it all out, again, you lose it becomes there becomes too much noise to signal to really understand the logical relationship between different components in the system. I like to think that Django apps naturally represent logical representations of different parts of a project or a system. A project obviously is too large unless you're dealing with multiple projects, but within a single Django project, it's a good representation to have an app deal with one thing. You can I know you can structure Django projects & apps in many ways. So it'd be interesting to see this tool used on other's project structures that aren't one app for a single logical component.

So without further ado, here is Django Dependency Map, which combines output from Django extensions graph_models and grimp, which is used by import-linter to dynamically map the dependencies between your different apps and third-party apps. Initially, it was a management command, which then outputs a HTML file, which exists. I then added that into a live view, and there's an integration into Django debug toolbar.

The live map page has the following features:

• you can hide nodes and kind of see how the dependencies change.
• force graph & hierarchical graph representation,
• Detailed information on a single app and its relationships
• import cycle detection
• import violations from import-linter
• Debug toolbar panel
• Export of the graph to mermaid & dot formats

My hope is twofold. One, it might reveal things about your projects that you didn't know about in terms of how fit how interlinked things are. And secondly, I hope it may change the way you build your Django apps. I'm hoping to have it open as another tab and just to watch as I'm building things to make sure out as I'm and maybe as an agent's building things see use it as a sense check of if it's doing things right or as I expect it to in terms of overall architecture rather than at the code level.

The pypi package is coming very soon, but you can visit the repo here: https://github.com/softwarecrafts/django-dependency-map