Detect circular dependencies in the codebase

[mshustov]

Problem

We faced a problem with the new babel preset typescript setup.
Modules with circular dependencies are processed by webpack without warnings, but sometimes in runtime exports aren't defined.
@mistic :

we found some of those cases when we move from typescript compiler to the babel preset typescript
which is not tolerant to circular dependencies at all, maybe that is the reason why it was working in the past and not now

The problem confuses developers and it is very hard to debug. Every project where I worked before had problems with circular deps and it led to long hours of debugging.

Suggestion

Since we are in a process of migration to the new platform, it looks like a good time to introduce additional checks to avoid future problems with cyclic deps.
I'd suggest adding an analyzer in our pipeline, preferably it's runnable with CLI interface. https://github.com/pahen/madge works well on my other projects so far.
If you want to test the output, run:

npx madge --circular src/

Ofc, it doesn't support our custom module resolution mechanism.
Want to hear from @elastic/kibana-operations

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-platform

[spalger]

I'm interested, as long as it doesn't get in the way of us doing things we need to!

[FrankHassanabad]

We just ran into a bad circular deps issue on our end and what we did without full tooling in the meantime to detect and fix them was:

Install madge globally

npm -g install madge

Run a build

yarn build --no-oss --skip-os-packages

Then after the build go to the transpiled code:

cd ~/projects/kibana/build/kibana/x-pack/plugins

And run madge against a plugin or project

madge -c ${plugin_name}

That gave us a list in which we fixed.

[mshustov]

looks like madge switched a resolution mechanism to https://github.com/dependents/node-dependency-tree, which supports webpack and tsconfig aliases out of the box ⭐️

[FrankHassanabad]

We have been using a script which calls in madge within the plugin SIEM for the last ~2 months with great success if anyone wants to adapt it to their project. It's part of the build chain and fails any code which has a circular dep within it.

https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/master/x-pack/legacy/plugins/siem/scripts/check_circular_deps.js

https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/master/x-pack/legacy/plugins/siem/dev_tools/circular_deps/run_check_circular_deps_cli.js

[mshustov]

closed in favour of #78162