Iris

View Source

A tool for visualizing your Elixir codebase.

Iris aims to reduce the time taken to skim through an Elixir codebase by rendering an interactive GUI displaying the constituent applications, modules, methods and method call paths, even documentation!

Iris for Elixir screenshot

The following features are implemented.

  • List all Applications in elixir lib
  • List all Modules in an application
  • List all methods in an application
  • Generate & View inbound and outbound calls from a selected method
  • Click on outbound call method to expand the method and view its outbound calls
  • Show Method documentation
  • Show Module documentation
  • Detect and denote recursive methods with a recursion icon
  • Detect and denote methods that have documentation with a docs icon

Installation

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

def deps do
  [
    {:iris, "~> 0.1.2"}
  ]
end

Hex package located at https://hexdocs.pm/iris.

Usage

Execute the following command after ensuring iris is added to your dependency list.

mix iris

For more info use the verbose flag as such:

mix iris -v
mix iris --verbose

To link the generated iris GUI in documentation generated by ex_doc

  • Add an empty IrisUI.md in the root directory of the project
  • Add IrisUI.md to the extras section of docs in mix.exs. See example
  • Execute mix iris.docs
  • You will find a link to IrisUI in the Pages section to irisui.html

Interactive Demo

HexDocs hosts the Iris GUI for this project! generated by mix iris.docs

Find the interactive UI at HexDocs -- https://hexdocs.pm/iris/irisui.html

Known Limitations

  • Functions passed as parameters and invoked using the dot notation are not fully supported
  • Lambdas are not fully supported
  • All external method calls are not rendered by default, however there should be a toggle for this in the next version of this library
    • External methods refers to Elixir/Erlang modules such as Keyword, Path, Enum, etc.

Contribution

If you encounter any issue, raise a github issue with a minimal example that reproduces the issue.

This project implementation can be improved a lot, pull requests that improve the codebase/address any issues are welcome.

License

Iris source code is released under the Apache 2 License.

Any content of Iris, or any content generated by any "Derivative Works" (as specified in the Apache 2 License), must include a direct, and visible link to the Iris repository on each rendered material.

This project is heavily inspired by ExDoc and uses some of its source code in generating and viewing documentation. Documentation views contain direct, readable and visible links to the ExDoc repository as specified by the license. The icon used to denote recursive methods is from Grommet.