TangleGuard

Helps you keep spaghetti code out of your codebase.

TangleGuard visualizes your software architecture, so you know how the degree of coupling and cohesion, and hence can keep an easy-to-maintain and scalable code structure.

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Features

• Interactive Architecture Analysis: View your codebase as an interactive dependency graph for suitable layouts. Click on edges or hover over nodes to get more information.
• Dependency Rule System: Define dependency rules in a configuration file and TangleGuard detects violations. See the docs on how to set it up.
• Circular dependencies detection: Dependencies which form a cycle are highlighted and a list of all the import statements which form that cycles is displayed, so you know where to refactor.
• Metrics: Calculates metrics on the fly depending on the current view

Usage

The extension will add a new button in the left toolbar. Click an it and select the scanner you want to run, depending on the programming language you're working with.

Alternatively, you can open TangleGuard UI via the Command Palette (Cmd+Shift+P / Ctrl+Shift+P). Search for the command: "Analyze Architecture" and run it and select the scanner you want to run.

2. Explore Your Codebase

• Zoom in or out via mouse wheel or touchpad
• Filter the dependency graph
  • Adjust the depth/zoom level for get more or less details
  • Filter packages by their name
  • Filter nodes by their LOC
  • Filter dependencies/edges by type
• Click on edges to see what flows over that edge

For more in depth information about the exploration feature, see here.

3. Define Your High-Level Architecture

• Click on the layer icon in the left, vertical menu
• Add layers to the canvas and draw the allowed dependencies
• For each layer, specify the relative path in your codebase, where the components are for that layer
• TangleGuard will automatically run the violation check and you can see the violations

More about the dependency rules here.

Sign In

TangleGuard is currently in its evaluation phase. To use the extension you need a free account so we can reach out for feedback and stay in touch with early users. Open the TangleGuard sidebar and click Sign In — a browser window will open for sign-up/sign-in, and you'll be redirected back to VS Code automatically. Your session is stored securely in your OS keychain, so you only need to do this once.

Currently Supported Languages

• Rust
• Go
• JavaScript/TypeScript (inkl. Svelte)
• Python
• PHP (early stage)
• Kotlin (early stage)

For more information about the language support visit TangleGuard Docs

Performance

• Fast Scanning: Scans your codebase within milliseconds - the scanner is written in Rust
• Fast Visualization Data: The viz data is created within using WebAssembly