doNotFollow in API works unexpectedly

Maybe this isn’t actually a bug and I just misunderstand the purpose of this option? If that’s the case feel free to correct my expectations 🙂

Expected Behavior

Including doNotFollow: 'node_modules' in the API options adds the list of dependencies my modules have on npm packages but doesn’t include those npm packages in dependency traversal.

Current Behavior

Including doNotFollow: 'node_modules' adds the list of npm package dependencies but also traverses all of node_modules.

Steps to Reproduce

repro repo

1. Compare cruise(['./'], {doNotFollow: 'node_modules'}).output with cruise(['./']).output: there appears to be no difference.

Context

Wishing to get a list of dependencies (including npm package dependencies) but without traversing node_modules because that folder gets huge and I don’t care about the dependencies in there 🙂

Your Environment

• Version used: 8.2.0
• Node version: 12.16.0
• Link to your project: https://github.com/electrovir/test-dependency-cruiser-do-not-follow/blob/master/test.ts

[sverweij]

I, of course, would vote for the change the behaviour to be more intuitive option but I don’t know > anything about how this might affect current users.

Second that - it should’ve worked that way from the outset (so thanks for realising this, raising it as an issue and being tenacious!). I doubt it is going to affect a lot of current users - or even whether it would classify as a breaking change. But even if it is, dependency-cruiser will get a major-bump - which will have to happen soon anyway because node 8 support is becoming untenable and needs to be dropped.

[sverweij]

Hi @electrovir - this is similar to the mono-repo I’ve worked with over the last years. We’ve been using something like packages/*/{src,lib} as a pattern because that’s where the sources typically resided. For also including all cases maybe-not-named-src some glob magic will be required indeed.

As a first try I’ve used the pattern "packages/*/!(node_modules)" - and that works as expected, in the sense that scans everything in packages/*/, except node_modules. You might want to include some extra inclusion patterns there for good measure - dist (or wherever generated javascript goes), coverage might be good candidates, but maybe also config files…

const lResult = cruise(["packages/*/!(node_modules|dist|coverage)"], {
  doNotFollow: "node_modules",
  outputType: "text", // or whatever reporter you'd want to use
}).output;

under the hood dependency-cruiser uses glob, for argument matching. You can exercise that with minimatch for quick feedback cycles on what patterns yield what result

=> Just interested: what’s the reason to use the API instead of the cli?