I would like to work on a linter plugin that would verify that dependencies between targets are allowed. For example, our domain layer shouldn't depend on the application layer. Another example, one micro-service should only depend on the contract of another micro-service but not the code. So the idea is to use some kind of wildcard on both sides of the rule. For example:

dependency_rule("/modules/core/application/*", allowed=["/modules/core/domain/*"])

What would be the best matching utility within pants for that?

I think this has been discussed in two tickets, but I'm less sure of the result for today: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/15247 https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/15803

Thanks. I think I have a different approach than 15247 that might work, but I might be wrong. Anyway, I will take a stab at it, an internal plugin at the moment. The visibility approach is interesting as well.

This is one of our most requested features, so we'd love to see progress here 🙂

few thoughts: 1. I like the

visibility

feature, but I don't think it covers correctly the different contexts. For example, it make sense for the application layer (e.g

/micro-service-1/application

) to only be visible to the anything within

/micro-service-1/application

, but the contract layer (

/micro-service-1/contract

) cannot and shouldn't know which other micro-services is allowed to consume it. That should be defined at the consumer level. 2. I think inheritance is important here, both for

visibility

and the linter solution. Otherwise to manage it one would have to repeat same configuration over a lot of BUILD files, which is error-prone. 3. I think both visibility field and a linter could cover both contexts.

Is this string provided as the cmd line specs in the call to

./pants

, or is this a string that appears in a rule definition.

the later, yes.