Dependency Tracking

Confix's reporting offers insights into your project's dependencies, allowing for a deeper understanding and management of configurations that involve elements like database names, URLs, connection strings, and more.

Dependency tracking in Confix enables you to monitor and report on configuration dependencies. Whether it's tracking variables, components, database configurations, or client identifiers, you can get a clear picture of all dependencies in your project.

Example Scenarios:

1. Identifying Database Usage: If multiple services connect to various databases, by tracking the database names or URLs, you can pinpoint which service links to a particular database.

2. Monitoring Third-party Integrations: For instance, if using Auth0 for authentication, tracking ensures you know which service uses a specific Auth0 client ID.

Report Structure

When executing the confix project report command, the report will include a section for dependencies:

{
   ...
  "dependencies": [
    {
      "kind": "client_id",
      "path": "/test/value",
      ...
    }
  ]
}

• kind: Defines the dependency kind, for example mongodb.database, mongodb.url, auth0.clientId, etc. The kind is a string value that you specify. This categorization can be used by your processing and management of the dependencies.

• path: Shows the location in the JSON configuration where the dependency is used.

Dependency Extraction Providers

Confix has two built in providers to extract and track these dependencies:

1. Regex Provider

By defining a regular expression pattern with named capture groups in the regex provider, values matching these groups in your configurations will be extracted and logged.

You can specify multiple regex patterns to extract different dependency kinds.

Example: To extract and log database URLs from a configuration value, create a regex pattern that identifies and captures the URL.

{
  "reporting": {
    "dependencies": {
      "providers": [
        {
          "kind": "mongodb.url",
          "type": "regex",
          "regex": "mongodb://(?<host>[^/]+)"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Output

{
  "dependencies": [
    {
      "kind": "mongodb.url",
      "path": "/database/connectionString",
      "data": [
        {
          "name": "host",
          "value": "yourdb.mongodb.com"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

2. GraphQL Provider

For JSON configurations based on a GraphQL schema, there is also the GraphQL provider. Fields in the GraphQL schema can be annotated with the @dependency directive, and Confix will log those fields as dependencies.

Example: Annotating a field for a MongoDB database in a GraphQL schema with @dependency(kind: "mongodb.database") will let Confix extract the field's value as depndency of kind mongodb.database.

{
  "reporting": {
    "dependencies": {
      "providers": [
        {
          "type": "graphql"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

type Authentication {
  clientId: String! @dependency(kind: "auth0.clientId")
  clientSecret: String!
}

Output

{
  "dependencies": [
    {
      "kind": "auth0.clientId",
      "path": "/database/connectionString",
      "value": "123456-1234-1234-123456"
    }
  ]
}

Extensibility

We welcome feedback (and contributions) to enhance this capabilities. If existing extraction providers don't align with your needs, open a issue. We'd love to hear from you.