Skip to content
CodeCharta CodeCharta

Introduction

CodeCharta is an open-source code visualization tool. It turns a codebase into a map you can explore: a 3D city of code metrics, a word cloud of its domain language and a graph of its dependencies. The map makes the shape of the code visible, so you can find the hotspots, show them to others and agree on what to change first.

Three views of one map

Section titled “Three views of one map”
  • Metric view: every file is a building, every folder a district. You choose what area, height and color stand for, such as lines of code, complexity, number of commits or number of authors.
  • Domain view: the words in identifiers, comments and strings, sized by frequency or TF-IDF. It shows what a folder is about, not how big it is.
  • Dependencies view: folders and files arranged by level, with dependency cycles and dependencies that point against the layering marked.

Compare puts two versions of a map side by side as one delta map, and 3D print turns the city into a model you can hold.

Who it is for

Section titled “Who it is for”

CodeCharta is built for developers and tech leads who need to understand a codebase quickly or talk about it with people who do not read code. Typical questions it answers:

  • Which files are large, complex and changed all the time?
  • Which parts of the code does only one person know?
  • Which files always change together, even without depending on each other?
  • What is this folder about, and where does a business term live in the code?
  • Where do the dependencies run in circles or against the architecture?
  • What changed between two releases?

MaibornWolff develops CodeCharta and uses it in its Software Health Checks, where the map helps teams and managers talk about the same parts of the code.

How it works

Section titled “How it works”

CodeCharta has two parts:

  1. The CodeCharta Shell (ccsh) analyses your code, reads the git or svn history, imports metrics from tools such as SonarQube, and writes the result into one .cc.json file. ccsh analyse does all of this in one step.
  2. The Web Studio opens that file and renders it as an interactive map. It runs in your browser or as a desktop app.

Both run on your machine. Your code and your metrics are not uploaded anywhere; see Data privacy.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”