We’ve come to love sbt-dependency-graph, but have been frustrated with the ascii output, and found the other outputs not straightforward to use. This sbt plugin provides some “sugar” that makes life a bit nicer when you are running on a machine with GraphViz installed. A fork and new home of the unmaintained Gilt sbt plugin, now under the GFC Collective umbrella, maintained by some of the original authors.

Its version is taken from sbt-dependency-graph (current version is 0.9.2), and if you include this plugin, you are pulling in sbt-dependency-graph automatically.

Enable the plugin with the following configurgation:

addSbtPlugin("org.gfccollective" % "sbt-dependency-graph-sugar" % "0.9.2")

Instead of putting this in your project’s project/plugins.sbt file, we recommend putting it once in your ~/.sbt/0.13/plugins/sbt-dependency-graph-sugar.sbt file, so that it is available in all your apps and managed in the “per-machine plane” instead of per application. This way you can customize the command to view the svg to work always on a given machine.

dependencySvg creates a svg file into the target directory of the project

dependencySvgView views the svg file in a browser

By default, the svg file is opened using the command open -a Safari [path-to-svg]. This should work well on a default Mac. You can change this behaviour by creating a file, ~/.sbt/gilt/sbt-dependency-graph-sugar-cmd that holds a replacement command. The plugin will try to find the first line of the file that it can parse as a command, and it should have the token $1 where the path to the svg file should go. Example:

$ cat ~/.sbt/gilt/sbt-dependency-graph-sugar-cmd
open -a Google\ Chrome $1

The output format can be changed by setting the dependencyGraphOutputFormat key:

  dependencyGraphOutputFormat in Compile := "png"

This must include a configuration. There is a helper to modify the keys for all configs:

gilt.DependencyGraph.inConfigs(dependencyGraphOutputFormat := "png")

You can obviously put whatever command works on your particular OS, and as long as the scala.sys.process._ machinery can run it, it should work fine.

Many thanks to Johannes Rudolph for the sbt-dependency-graph plugin, and Andrey Kartashov for the original concept and implementation in our internal build plugin.