I have been having a hard time at work getting to the bottom of a dependency issue. As a result, I have spent far more time than I would like to manually parsing package-lock.json. Eventually, I thought “someone has to have made a tool for this” and it turns someone did! William Wong’s lock-walker was very helpful while trying to debug my problem. However, there were some improvements I thought I could make:
I’m not going to go very deep in to how I wrote the application, as I learned a lot of disparate things on this project, but I do want to touch on some of the tools that helped me solve the problem.
Goals 1 and 2 were easily accomplished using hooks. With useHistory and uselocation from React Router I was able to set the URL when searching and get the URL whenever it changed to trigger the filter. With useLocalStorage from react-use I was able to persist the uploaded packages.
This was my first project using React Hooks and they are satisfying to say the least. I got a lot of mileage out of useDebounce and I also used useMeasure to power the application’s element queries.
The third goal, making the filter faster, was the most challenging part of the project. I had to figure out how to filter the package dependency tree down to matches and their parents, excluding irrelevant children and siblings. Thankfully, I found Deepdash—a tree traversal extension for lodash—which took care of a lot of the heavy lifting. Deepdash’s reduceDeep with leavesOnly set to true allowed me to visit every childless node, trim the path if necessary, and collect it in the final filtered tree. Ramda’s set and lensPath came in handy setting new values on the reducer’s accumulator in a performant and immutable fashion.
Package Lock Inspector is live now and you can also view it’s source.