processcdb

Simple front-end tool that can run various static analysis tools by reading the required information from compile_commands.json.

Provides output formatting for integration to other tools, parallerization when needed, ability to override/reconfigure compiler flags and such on per "tool" plugin requirements.

Current development is done mainly on Windows but should work on any platform where you have python, working development environment for your own project and analyzer. Currently supported ones:

• clang-tidy
• cppcheck
• lizard

Installation

Project is available in pypi as source distribution:

pip install processcdb

Since processcdb will also install few dependencies, using pipx for installation is adviced.

Once package is installed. Generate a configuration file with:

processcdb --dump-config

This will generate barebones configuration file to default location (can be overwritten later with --config argument). Edit this file to point "binary" options for those analyzer to point to their executable. On windows, do not omit file extension.

Usage

Basic help:

processcdb --help

After a process of generating a compile_commands.json, you can run processcdb with selected tool like this:

processcdb --tool clang-tidy

This will try to locate the json file from current working directory and runs the tool, in this case clang-tidy, against all files that are compiled and not blacklisted in processcdb comfig file or in tools own configuration file and generates the output to standard output. If you need to run the tool when you don't have access to change the current working directory, you can pass --cdb and absolute location:

processcdb --tool clang-tidy --cdb D:\src\myproject\build\compile_commands.json

One can direct the tools output to a file with --output argument. Worth noting that that certain tools (-t) can provide further arguments for post processing or tool specific purposes:

processcdb --tool clang-tidy --cdb ~/src/myproject/build/compile_commands.json --output scan.log --xml

If processcdb is invoked without passing --config argument, a default configuration file is used. Location depends on operating system. If you need to analyze multiple projects with different sort of settings or you want to analyze with different versions of a particular scanner, use multiple configuration files.

For example, if you have a codebase thst you wish to scan with clang 11.0.0 but your project is really compiled with Microsoft's msvc and you have another project that does compile with clang: make separate config file for msvc and clang and invoke processcdb:

processcdb --tool clang-tidy --config location/to/config/msvc17_clang_interop.ini

Configuration

If processcdb is invoked without passing --config argument, a default configuration file is used. To generate a config file, pass --dump-config to the processcdb. To save the default config file to a file. either capture the standard output or provide --config parameter.

Configuration file

Each tool has a separate section and each section can be configured either in the tool specific section or in default. Minimal. single tool configuratio would look something like this:

[clang-tidy]
binary=C:\llvm-11.0.0\bin\clang-tidy.exe

Here we have section for clang-tidy tool, where we are setting a variable binary to a value of c:\llvm-11.0.0\bin\clang-tidy.exe.

Python configparser module is used for loading/parsing of the file.

Following variables are shared between the tools:

• binary - absolute path to a scanner.
• file_blacklist - list of file specs that should be omitted from the scan
• arg_blacklist - list of command line arguments passed to compiler that should not be passed to a tool.
• arg_additions - a list of of key/value pairs. If key is found in json, a value is placed into tool's arguments.
• jobs - default number processes processcdb or the tool can use to process. 0 for auto detect.
• default_includes - list of paths that should be automatically passed to the tool as include paths which might not be be specified in the compile_commands.json
• default_args - list of arguments that should be passed to the tool that are not provided by the compile_commands.json
• includes_as_system: list of file specs that that should converted from normal -I include to -isystem include.

Each config option that is a list and allows multiple values, use semicolon as item separator.

with arg_blacklist, one can strip away unnecessary command line arguments and arg_addition can be used to inject new arguments. For example, if is compiling a project in msvc and exceptions are enabled, following configuration would allow clang-tidy tool to still work correctly:

[clang-tidy]
binary=C:\llvm-11.0.0\bin\clang-tidy.exe
arg_blacklist=EHsc
arg_additions=EHsc=-Xclang,-fcxx-exceptions

As first, processcdb would notice that compile_commands.json might have /EHsc argument, it would add 2 new arguments -Xclang and '-fcxx-exceptions' and then arg_blacklist would then remove the original /EHsc

cppcheck tool also has option supression_file which, if needed, should be absolute location of cppchecks own suppression file.

Credits

clang-tidy toool's ability to convert the logfile to xml for direct jenkins support is part of CodeChecker project and its licensed under Apache 2.0

Links

Home: https://github.com/rasjani/processcdb Issues: https://github.com/rasjani/processcdb/issues