How do you report violations to devs? #184

Hey @silasb , Alex here from Gusto's Product Infrastructure team. We created the Packwerk VSCode Extension and as you said, we parse the output using regular expressions. We were also wondering if we can be able to pass in a --json flag to bin/packwerk check. As @exterm suggested, we can do this today by doing something like this:

This executes the CLI

formatter = YourModule::YourFancyFormatter.new
style = Packwerk::OutputStyles::Coloured.new
Packwerk::Cli.new(style: style, offenses_formatter: formatter)

This is an implementation of YourFancyFormatter

# typed: strict
# typed: strict
module YourModule
 module YourFancyFormatter
 extend T::Sig
 include Packwerk::OffensesFormatter
 sig { override.params(offenses: T::Array[T.nilable(Packwerk::Offense)]).returns(String) }
 def show_offenses(offenses)
 # Here you can do anything you want!
 # If you want, you can just go right ahead and modify the offenses output to display in a way
 # that is useful for the engineers at your company. Note that since we're dealing with in-memory
 # representations of `Packwerk::Offense`, it's inherently machine readable.
 # However, you can also serialize the array of `Packwerk::Offense` in a JSON format so that other
 # systems can parse that however they want
 end
 end
 end
end

If we wanted packwerk to output JSON, then we could just implement a new formatter in packwerk that is switched to with the --json flag. I do imagine that could be really useful to have, and perhaps the JSON could just be the same exact interface of Packwerk::Offense (i.e. it moves in lockstep with the currently supported public Ruby API for formatters).

I'm curious though if this solution would work for you in an interim state as we learn more about what the JSON public interface should be. If this doesn't solve things, please share what's missing 🙏

Just wanted to provide an update on this – you can now pass in your own custom offenses formatter without too much funny business!

https://github.com/Shopify/packwerk/blob/main/USAGE.md#custom-offense-formatter