Running callGraph on mac

[lukemmtt]

Hi there,

This is a very useful looking tool, but I'm having trouble running it on mac.

I've run brew install graphviz as well as sudo cpan install GraphViz, copied callGraph's executable into /usr/local/Cellar/graphviz/2.48.0/bin, and called it like so, with the following error:

macbook ~ % callgraph /Users/username/Developer/Project/FileToGraph.swift
ERROR: Install GraphViz and the CPAN GraphViz module to create the call graph
sudo apt-get install Graphviz
and
sudo cpan install GraphViz

Am I doing something wrong? Is it possible to use callGraph on macOS?

Thanks,
Luke

[koknat]

Hi,
I don't have a mac, but I'd like to help you figure this out.
The message is printed because the perl eval fails:

eval 'use GraphViz ()';
if ($@) {
say "ERROR: Install GraphViz and the CPAN GraphViz module to create the call graph";
...
}

To troubleshoot, you could try to get a basic Perl GraphViz example running

[lukemmtt]

Thanks for the pointer: that helped a lot and I got everything working.

Side note: This tool works fantastically well—thank you!

Here's the output generated for my project. It's a bit cluttered, but all-encompassing and extremely helpful.

———
For the record, here's some background on how I got this working.

Full disclosure: I'm out of my element here—I know nothing about Perl, GraphViz, or how any of these things are supposed to work together on Mac. I basically just followed the error messages and moved files to where the errors told me they should be. Ugly and wrong, yes, but it works for now.

Things I tried:

1. brew install graphviz
2. sudo cpan install GraphViz
3. Downloaded callGraph, perl_call_graph, graphviz-perl, and IPC-Run directly.
4. Ran perl_call_graph, which returned the following error

user@lmbp ~ % /Users/user/Downloads/callGraph-main/perl_call_graph-master/bin/perl_call_graph
Can't locate GraphViz.pm in @inc (you may need to install the GraphViz module) (@inc contains: /Library/Perl/5.30/darwin-thread-multi-2level [...]

5. Navigated to /Library/Perl/5.30 and transferred the IPC-Run and GraphViz components there
6. Ran perl_call_graph again, this time successfully

user@lmbp ~ % /Users/lukememet/Downloads/callGraph-main/perl_call_graph-master/bin/perl_call_graph
Please specify some files to parse!

7. Ran callGraph successfully

user@lmbp ~ % callGraph /Users/user/Developer/Project/Models/DataModel.swift
Generating: /tmp/call_graph_rdzg/DataModel.swift.dot
Converting to /tmp/call_graph_rdzg/DataModel.swift.png
Displaying /tmp/call_graph_rdzg/DataModel.swift.png using 'open'

Lastly, to generate the image shown above, I navigated to my project's directory, searched for all .swift files within the directory, selected all of them, typed callGraph in terminal, drag & dropped the selected files into terminal and hit enter.

[koknat]

I'm glad you were able to figure it out.
Thank you for providing your notes.

You may be able to clean up your image by providing options such as:
-start __MAIN__ -ignore '(topViewController|dateStringForDate)'

I've enhanced the callGraph error message to include the "@inc contains" message

If anyone else has problems getting Perl GraphViz to work, I suggest creating the Perl GraphViz example program "Graphviz_example.pl" to aid in troubleshooting:

use GraphViz;
my $g = GraphViz->new();
$g->add_node('London');
$g->add_node('Paris', label => 'City of\nlurve');
$g->add_node('New York');
$g->add_edge('London' => 'Paris');
$g->add_edge('London' => 'New York', label => 'Far');
$g->add_edge('Paris' => 'London');
print $g->as_png;

Save this in a text editor and run it using:
perl Graphviz_example.pl > Graphviz_example.png

Once this works, then 'callGraph' should also work