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Core Concepts¶
Checkmate uses three core abstractions:
Project : A project is everything that structure that contains a .checkmate directory.
- Snapshot : A snapshot represents the state of an entire project or a subset of it at a given point,
which can e.g. be a given commit or the local state at a given point in time.
File Revision : A file revision represents the state of a given file in the project at a given point.
The Project¶
In checkmate, you create a new project by running checkmate init. This will create a .checkmate folder either in your current working directory, or, if you call it inside a git repository, in the directory that contains the .git folder. You project consists of all files contained in the directory that contains the .checkmate folder (including all subdirectories).
Snapshots¶
A snapshot represents the state of your entire project or a subset of the project at a given point. This can be e.g. a certain git commit or just the local state of the project directory at a given time. Snapshots are generated through the checkmate analyze command.
File Revisions¶
A file revision describe the state of a file at a given point. It contains both statistics as well as a list of issues for the given file. To create a snapshot, several file revisions are bundled together.
Generating a New Snapshot¶
When you run checkmate analyze, the following things happen behind the scenes:
- checkmate generates a list of all the files matching your analysis request
- it checks which of these file revisions have not yet been analyzed
- it analyzes the missing file revisions and stores the results in its database
- it creates a snapshot from the file revisions
Like this, checkmate makes sure to never analyze the same file twice, which greatly improves the performance of the tool when running it against a large codebase.