pipforester

Forester tools for pipdeptree outputs to analyze and cleanup the dependency graph of installed pip packages.

Features

• clean up a graph to remove direct dependencies if a transitive dependency exists and output it as dot-file.
• detect transitive cyclic dependencies
  • color them in the graph
  • show them as separate graphs in one dot-file
  • exit pipforester with exit code 1 if there are cycles detected

Installation:

• Create an empty virtual environment, separate from the environment to work on.
• pip install pipdeptree pipforester

Dependent on your operation system you

• want to install a program to view dot-files, like xdot i.e. with apt install xdot on Debian/Ubuntu-based systems.
• or use graphviz to convert dot-files to PNG/SVG.

Usage

First, call pipdeptree on a virtual environment to create a JSON file of the installed dependencies, and second call pipforester to create a cleaned-up dot file.

pipdeptree --python  path/to/venv/bin/python -j >forest.json
pipforester -i forest.json -o forest.dot

Finally use a Graphviz DOT-file visualizer, i.e. xdot on Linux, to view the graph.

xdot forest.dot

Or use the dot command line program to generate an SVG or PNG:

dot -Tsvg -o forest.svg forest.dot
dot -Tpng -o forest.png forest.dot

To generate a graph containing only cyclic transitive dependencies, use the --cycles option:

pipdeptree -j >forest.json
pipforester -i forest.json -o forest.dot --cycles

To detect cyclic transitive dependencies and exit with 1 if there is at least one, use the --check-cycles option. It does not generate an output graph and is meant for usage in CI.

pipdeptree -j >forest.json
pipforester -i forest.json --check-cycles

See pipforester --help for details.