Detect cyclic imports

[dmontagu]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

One form of static check that I think would be really useful for helping make sure a codebase is well organized and robust to refactors is import cycle detection.

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Currently, I occasionally make use of this neat little tool and run it over my projects and manually inspect the graphs to look for import cycles. I typically find that, after refactoring in such a way to make my import graph a DAG, everything feels better organized, and I can more flexibly add new functionality without running into fragile cyclic import logic.

(Note: python can handle cyclic imports in some cases, but in my experience, its usually a sign that modules aren't organized as well as they could be.)

So far, I haven't found any tools that can automatically generate a warning when two modules import each other, or more generally when there is an import cycle.

(The tool linked above just generates graphs, nothing CI/linter-friendly, though the data necessary is obviously present somewhere in memory while generating the graphs.)

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Describe the solution you'd like

It would be really awesome if bento could warn me if/when my import graph is not a DAG.

This probably doesn't fall under the purview of of flake8 or bandit, so I'm not sure how much of a priority it would be for bento in the short term, but I would find this very useful (and I think it shouldn't be too hard to implement).

[ievans]

Thanks for filing an issue, @dmontagu !

Have you taken a look at https://github.com/bndr/pycycle for import detection? Curious if it would work to solve your specific usecase. If so, it might not be hard for us to integrate!

[dmontagu]

Nope haven't tried it, but yes, it does look like it would address my use case!