Clarity (Clarity v0.4.0)

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⚠️ Alpha Notice: Clarity is currently in an alpha state. APIs and features may change rapidly, and things may break. Feedback and contributions are very welcome!

Clarity is an interactive introspection and visualization tool for Elixir projects.
It automatically discovers and visualizes applications, domains, resources, modules, and their relationships, giving you a navigable graph interface enriched with diagrams, tooltips, and documentation.

Clarity Screenshot

Features

  • 📊 Graph navigation – explore your application structure visually.
  • 🗂 Extensible introspection – support for Ash domains/resources, Phoenix endpoints, Ecto repos, and more.
  • 🖼 Mermaid & Graphviz diagrams – ER diagrams, class diagrams, and policy diagrams where available.
  • 📝 Markdown rendering – show documentation from moduledocs and resource definitions.
  • 🔎 Interactive tooltips – quick overviews of vertices and edges.
  • ⚡ LiveView-powered – fully dynamic, real-time updates in the browser.
  • 🔌 Custom extensions – add your own introspectors to visualize domain-specific concepts.

Third-Party Libraries

Third-party libraries can add custom content to Clarity, extending its visualization capabilities. To install any of these libraries, simply add them to your mix.exs dependencies.

Installation

Igniter

mix igniter.install clarity

Manual

The package can be installed by adding clarity to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:clarity, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Router:

import Clarity.Router
clarity("/clarity")

License

Copyright 2025 Alembic Pty Ltd

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Summary

Types

event()
modules_diff()
queue_info()
status()
subscription_topic()
t()
unsubscribe()

Functions

get(server \\ Clarity.Server, mode \\ :partial)

Get current clarity state.

introspect(server \\ Clarity.Server, scope \\ :full)

Start introspection process.

subscribe(server \\ Clarity.Server, topics, ref \\ nil)

Subscribe to clarity events. Returns an unsubscribe function.

Types

event()

@type event() ::
  :work_started
  | :work_completed
  | {:work_progress, queue_info()}
  | :__restart_pulling__
  • :work_started - Emitted when work starts
  • :work_completed - Emitted when all work is completed
  • {:work_progress, queue_info()} - Emitted periodically with current queue info

Topics starting with :__ are internal.

modules_diff()

@type modules_diff() :: %{changed: [module()], added: [module()], removed: [module()]}

queue_info()

@type queue_info() :: %{
  future_queue: non_neg_integer(),
  requeue_queue: non_neg_integer(),
  in_progress: non_neg_integer(),
  total_vertices: non_neg_integer()
}

status()

@type status() :: :working | :done

subscription_topic()

@type subscription_topic() ::
  :work_started | :work_completed | :work_progress | :__restart_pulling__
  • :work_started - Emitted when work starts
  • :work_completed - Emitted when all work is completed
  • :work_progress - Emitted periodically with current queue info

Topics starting with :__ are internal.

t()

@type t() :: %Clarity{
  graph: Clarity.Graph.t(),
  queue_info: queue_info(),
  status: status()
}

unsubscribe()

@type unsubscribe() :: (-> :ok)

Functions

get(server \\ Clarity.Server, mode \\ :partial)

@spec get(GenServer.server(), :partial | :complete) :: t()

Get current clarity state.

For :partial mode, returns the current state immediately. For :complete mode, waits for all work to complete before returning the final state.

introspect(server \\ Clarity.Server, scope \\ :full)

@spec introspect(
  GenServer.server(),
  :full | {:incremental, Application.app(), modules_diff()} | [module()]
) :: :ok

Start introspection process.

Options

  • :full - Full introspection, clears graph and re-introspects everything
  • {:incremental, app, modules_diff} - Incremental introspection based on module changes for specific app
  • [module()] - Introspect specific modules (legacy support)

subscribe(server \\ Clarity.Server, topics, ref \\ nil)

@spec subscribe(
  GenServer.server(),
  subscription_topic() | [subscription_topic()],
  reference() | nil
) :: unsubscribe()

Subscribe to clarity events. Returns an unsubscribe function.

Examples

# Subscribe to specific events only
unsubscribe = Clarity.subscribe([:work_started, :work_completed])

# Unsubscribe later
unsubscribe.()