dartograph 0.4.1

Evidence-backed dependency graph analysis for Dart and Flutter codebases.

dartograph

Queryable dependency graphs for Dart and Flutter codebases. The sister project of cartograph (Swift).

한국어 README

MIT licensed, and permanently free — commercial use included. There will never be a paid tier, license keys, seat or line-of-code limits, telemetry, or account sign-in.

The name blends Dart and cartograph.

Why

DCM (formerly dart_code_metrics) has unused-code and unused-file detection for Flutter — and went paid in 2023. Its free tier covers one seat and up to 50k lines of code; teams and larger projects have to pay.

dartograph fills that gap as permanently free (MIT), commercial use included — the same reason cartograph exists after Periphery went commercial.

• The source of truth is package:analyzer — the official analyzer published by the Dart team — not text search.
• Unused code, unused files, dependency cycles, layer rules, and architecture metrics all come from one graph.
• Every answer carries its evidence. dartograph never renders a deletion verdict.
• query and skill are built in from day one, designed to be consumed by coding agents.

Releases are published on pub.dev and GitHub Releases. Every release passes the full test suite, the line-coverage gate, a package dry-run, and dogfooding against real public Flutter plugins. bridges conservatively produces MethodChannel provenance, lexical scope, UTF-8 positions, UTC millisecond timestamps, and dynamic/unresolved limitations per isthmus GRAPH-EXCHANGE v1.

Install

dartograph is a pure Dart CLI and does not require the Flutter SDK. It runs on Dart 3.11 or later.

dart pub global activate dartograph
dartograph --version

From a source checkout, run the same commands via dart run dartograph.

Usage

Pass the root of the Dart package to analyze as the last argument.

dart run dartograph graph --format dot .
dart run dartograph graph --format html .
dart run dartograph dead --format text .
dart run dartograph baseline --write .dartograph-baseline.json .
dart run dartograph dead --format github-actions \
  --baseline .dartograph-baseline.json --since origin/main .
dart run dartograph query ApiClient --baseline .dartograph-baseline.json .
dart run dartograph query --batch requests.json .
dart run dartograph compare ../before-checkout ../after-checkout
dart run dartograph affected origin/main .
dart run dartograph skill
dart run dartograph bridges --format json .
dart run dartograph cycles --strict .
dart run dartograph rules --config layers.yaml --strict .
dart run dartograph metrics .

With a global install, replace dart run dartograph with dartograph on every line. Full arguments, output formats, exit codes, and CI examples live in doc/USAGE.md (Korean).

• --since builds the whole project graph first, then narrows reporting to the changed locations. It covers commits after the base ref, staged and unstaged edits, and untracked files; CI needs the full Git history. Report formats are text, json, github-actions, and sarif.
• query answers for a single symbol — both-direction neighbors, members, retention paths, and limitations — using the same field names as cartograph, instead of dumping the whole graph.
• affected <git-ref> answers which libraries changed since a Git revision and which libraries transitively depend on them, each with its shortest dependency path as evidence.
• bridges emits Flutter MethodChannel creation and invokeMethod/invokeListMethod/invokeMapMethod facts in isthmus GRAPH-EXCHANGE version 1. Dynamic names stay facts; unattributed or invalid calls and partial parses stay visible as limitation counts. EventChannel and BasicMessageChannel are outside the current join scope and are counted as limitations rather than mistaken for facts.
• cycles, rules, and metrics only report by default; findings become exit code 1 with --strict. Metrics are per-library Ca, Ce, instability, abstractness, and distance from the main sequence.

A // dartograph:ignore line comment suppresses dead reporting for the declaration it heads (retained as retentionReason: inlineIgnore) — a decision by the repository author, recorded in the graph itself.

dartograph does not decide what is safe to delete and never deletes code. Every finding's evidence and limitations need human review. It is a whole-project reachability tool, not a reimplementation of dart analyze's library-local unused_element.

Analysis limitations

• Conditional imports/exports: only the single configuration the analyzer picks is observed.
• String routes not connected to a route table are reported as limitations and never used as deletion evidence.
• Generated code older than its source is reported as a limitation; generated declarations themselves are conservatively retained.
• There can be multiple main functions. By default every entry point under lib/, bin/, and example/ is retained. Declaring the real build targets in dartograph.yaml entry_points narrows retention to the main functions of those files.
• Public declarations and public members exported by lib/<package-name>.dart are retained as the external consumer API.
• Dynamic calls and native behavior cannot be fully proven by a static graph.
• bridges accepts only direct imports of package:flutter/services.dart as provenance. Usage through barrels that re-export Flutter services is excluded from facts and reported as the flutter-services-reexports limitation.

The analysis cache lives outside the analyzed project, in the OS user cache (~/Library/Caches, $XDG_CACHE_HOME/~/.cache, %LOCALAPPDATA%) under dartograph/<project-root-hash>. It is invalidated automatically when project or dependency contents, mtimes, package resolution, the Dart SDK, or the analysis revision change. A missing or corrupted cache never changes results — it only costs analysis time.

Findings with more than 20 retention roots record the total count, a sample of the first 20, and retentionRootsTruncated: true to keep output bounded. The fact that evidence was truncated is never hidden.

Documents

Repository design documents are written in Korean.

Document	Contents
doc/PRD.md	What, for whom, how far — and what it will never do
doc/PLAN.md	Phase-by-phase plan
doc/RESEARCH.md	Confirmed facts, unconfirmed claims, sources
doc/DECISION-analyzer.md	Analyzer version, vertex IDs, generated code, caching decisions
doc/USAGE.md	Install, commands, exit codes, CI usage

Contributing and security

Contribution steps: CONTRIBUTING.md (Korean). Vulnerability reports: SECURITY.md (Korean). Release changes: CHANGELOG.md; a Korean version is kept in CHANGELOG.ko.md.

License

MIT. Permanently free, commercial use included. This is a feature of the project, not a footnote: the promise sits on the first screen of this README, and the pledge never to change the license is recorded in doc/PRD.md.