Hey folks, do any of our visualisations of the rule graph have types and rules as vertexes and edges as which types are produced/consumed by which rules? I'm trying to understand how the export goal works, and it would be really nice to have an easy way of seeing that process and not have to search for "which rule returns this type"

not a graph as such, but perhaps easier to use than simply searching/grepping:

pants ExportResult --help-advanced

`pants.core.goals.export.ExportResult` api type
-----------------------------------------------

ExportResult(description: 'str', reldir: 'str', *, digest: 'Digest' = Digest('e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855', 0), post_processing_cmds: 'Iterable[PostProcessingCommand]' = (), resolve: 'str | None' =
None)

activated by       : pants.backend.python
dependencies       : builtins
                     pants.backend.experimental.go
                     pants.backend.experimental.java
                     pants.backend.python.lint.autoflake
                     pants.backend.python.lint.black
                     pants.backend.python.lint.docformatter
                     pants.backend.python.lint.flake8
                     pants.backend.python.lint.isort
                     pants.backend.python.typecheck.mypy
                     pants.core
                     pants.engine.process
dependents         : pants.backend.python
returned by 3 rules: pants.backend.python.goals.export.do_export
                     pants.backend.python.goals.export.export_tool
                     pants.backend.python.goals.export.export_virtualenv_for_targets
consumed by 0 rules:
used in 4 rules    : pants.backend.python.goals.export.export_tool
                     pants.backend.python.goals.export.export_virtualenv_for_resolve
                     pants.backend.python.goals.export.export_virtualenv_for_targets
                     pants.backend.python.goals.export.export_virtualenvs

oh yeah, that looks like just what I need. I was digging through the rust code and wasn't finding it easy.

most rules are on the Python side anyways…

yeah, I was looking at engin-visualize-to. There are the huge graphs ("graph\.\d{3}\.dot"), but there's also "rule_graph.dot" and "rule_graph.export.dot". Those other 2 are close to what I was looking for, but the types aren't surfaced. The

help-all

goal is actually perfect for converting to a dot for this purpose, all the information I'd want is surfaced for each rule and type

Not at all an answer to your question, but fyi for help visualizing a graph there is also GraphMyRepo.com. (Caveat: it does not currently support private repos.)

Those other 2 are close to what I was looking for, but the types aren’t surfaced.

so, they used to be. but a recentish rule graph change caused us not to walk through union usages to all of the implementations of the union.

rule_graph.dot

will include everything, and so should show it. but it is too large to be useful.

rule_graph.export.dot

will only show things relevant to

export

, but will fail to walk into unions

peak usefulness

If that's graphmyrepo, it's zoomable