I've been toying with ways to take a pex lockfile and visualize it. I don't have a super concrete usecase here, but like "trying to get a sense of things" or "see if something looks fishey". The graph is big enough that I think I'm going to end up wanting some amount of interactivity (ex: click a node and highlight it's connections, search by id). Has anyone walked down this road before?

I had starting looking not at the visualization part but at exporting the lockfile as a JSON graph representation, to then be converted into whatever the input format a visualizer expects is. But that is stalled out at the moment.

I have had similar ideas for quite some time, but alas little progress..

I managed to make some pretty demoware. But I'm not sure where it "fits" longer term. A lot of the things I'd want to "query" of the graph are hueritics for dependency problems we happen to trip over so I'm not sure it is something solid enough to put in pants proper but.... almost everyone over a certain size would want something kind of like this? (This is probably all premature and I should keep iterating on making a concretely useful thing and not hypotheticals. )

@curved-manchester-66006 this is great, and I’ve been waiting to pick my “explorer ui” backend back up again. It has a GraphQL api on the backend and a Web UI on the frontend. Currently it occupies the pants cli to run the backend server, would probably want to decouple that, but seems that this could fit nicely somewhere in that area… https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/blob/main/src/python/pants/goal/explorer.py https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/tree/main/pants-plugins/pants_explorer/server (the frontend part has not yet landed.. but some collab on this could perhaps give me some more incentive to get back into it 😜 ) (it’s also unreleased, so only works from the pants repo, hopefully works I should say, haven’t looked at this for almost a year now)