New visualization of composer dependencies

[Francois Zaninotto]

Hi group,

I recently needed to visualize the entire list of dependencies of a large PHP web project using composer. All I could find was a library called graph-composer (https://github.com/clue/graph-composer), using GraphViz on the server side to build a dependency graph. This library proved useless for more than 10 packages, because it would create a very large graph (several thousands of pixels wide) with lots of overlapping arrows. And most libraries currently depend on way more than 10 packages (Symfony standard distribution, for instance, declares 11 direct dependencies, with an additional 14 indirect dependencies).

So I built a client-side visualization of composer dependencies using d3.js, designed for a larger number of dependencies (up to about 50). It's called a "Dependency Wheel", and you can try it out with your own projects, provided you have a composer.json and a composer.lock.

Here is the address to test your own project: http://redotheweb.com/DependencyWheel/

And the code is, of course, open-source: https://github.com/fzaninotto/DependencyWheel

I'd love some feedback from the composer community. Does it highlight interesting facts about your dependencies? What's missing in the visualization?

Cheers,

François Zaninotto