big-code-analysis-cli

bca analyzes source code and emits per-file structured metrics, aggregated reports, AST dumps, node lookups, and more.

Migrating from the flag-style CLI? The CLI is now subcommand-driven. See the migration guide for old-form -> new-form mappings of every flag.

Installation

From PyPI (pip)

The fastest path on Linux, macOS, and Windows — no Rust toolchain required:

pip install big-code-analysis-cli   # installs the `bca` command on PATH
bca --version

Note the deliberate split between the distribution name and the command name: you pip install big-code-analysis-cli, but the installed executable is bca. The bca name on PyPI belongs to an unrelated project, and big-code-analysis is this project's importable library bindings (pip install big-code-analysis — a different deliverable). The wheel ships the full all-languages grammar set; a single py3-none-<platform> wheel covers every CPython 3.x (and PyPy) on that platform. Prebuilt wheels are published for Linux (manylinux_2_28 x86_64 / aarch64), macOS (x86_64 / arm64), and Windows (x86_64); other platforms fall back to a source build.

From crates.io (cargo)

cargo install big-code-analysis-cli

From source

cd big-code-analysis-cli/
cargo build --release

Usage

bca [OPTIONS] <COMMAND> [COMMAND OPTIONS]

The command picks what to do; its options describe both what to walk (paths, includes/excludes, parallelism, language overrides) and how to format the result. Input-selection and walker-tuning flags are scoped to the subcommand that consumes them and must be written after the subcommand token — only -w / --warnings and --report-skipped are universal and accepted in any position.

Commands

Command Purpose
metrics Per-file metric output (-O cbor/csv/json/toml/yaml, --output-dir DIR).
ops Per-file operand/operator output (same formats as metrics).
report <FORMAT> Aggregated report (markdown or html).
check Check per-function metrics against thresholds; exits 2 on threshold violations.
dump AST dump to stdout (--line-start/--line-end to scope a range).
find <NODE>... Find nodes of one or more types (--line-start/--line-end to scope a range).
count <NODE>... Count nodes of one or more types.
functions List functions/methods and their spans.
strip-comments Remove comments from source files (--in-place).
preproc Build preprocessor-data JSON for C/C++ analysis.
list-metrics [names|descriptions] List computable metrics.

Run bca <COMMAND> --help for command-specific options.

Walking options

These input-selection and walker-tuning flags are accepted by the walking subcommands (metrics, ops, report, check, dump, find, count, functions, strip-comments) and must be written after the subcommand. A flag passed to a subcommand that never consumes it is a hard usage error (exit 1), not a silent no-op.

  • -p, --paths <FILE>... — input files or directories. The walking subcommands also accept paths positionally (bca metrics src/).
  • -I, --include <GLOB> — include files matching pattern (repeatable).
  • -X, --exclude <GLOB> — exclude files matching pattern (repeatable).
  • -j, --jobs <N> — worker threads (--num-jobs is a deprecated alias).
  • -l, --language <LANG> — force a language instead of inferring. Accepts a language name (rust) or extension (rs); unknown values error out.
  • -w, --warnings — print warnings (skipped files, unrecognized languages). --warning is a deprecated alias.
  • --no-skip-generated — disable auto-skip of files marked as generated (see Skipping generated code).
  • --report-skipped — log a skipped (generated): <path> line to stderr for every file the generated-code detector excludes.
  • --preproc-data <FILE> — consume an existing preproc JSON during C/C++ analysis. Build one with bca preproc.

-w / --warnings and --report-skipped are the only universal options; they are accepted in any position, before or after the subcommand.

Building with a subset of languages

The shipped bca binary compiles every supported tree-sitter grammar in. The big-code-analysis-cli crate pins the library's all-languages feature set explicitly, so passing --no-default-features or a custom --features list to cargo build -p big-code-analysis-cli does not drop grammars from the resulting binary — feature selection on the CLI crate is not honoured (see #252 for the rationale: dropping a grammar silently from a user-facing binary would surface as "language X stopped working" rather than a build error).

Consumers who need a reduced feature set should embed the big-code-analysis library in their own Rust code and control feature selection in their own Cargo.toml. See the library's per-language Cargo features chapter for the full list of features and a worked example.

Examples

Per-file JSON metrics:

bca metrics --paths ./src -O json --output-dir ./out/

Aggregated markdown quality report:

bca report markdown --paths "$PWD" --jobs $(nproc) \
    --top 20 --strip-prefix "$PWD/"

AST dump for one file:

bca dump ./file.rs

List all metrics with one-line descriptions:

bca list-metrics descriptions

Skipping generated code

Generated bindings (protobuf stubs, OpenAPI clients, lex/yacc output, build-system plumbing) inflate metrics for code no human will refactor. By default, bca scans the first ~50 lines / 5 KiB of each file for a generated-code marker and skips matches before parsing.

Recognized markers (case-insensitive):

  • @generated — Facebook / Meta convention; also emitted by buck2, rustfmt, prettier, and many code generators.
  • DO NOT EDIT — Go's // Code generated by … DO NOT EDIT. is the canonical form; the bare phrase is also widely copied (Bazel, protoc, OpenAPI clients).
  • GENERATED CODE — Lizard's marker, recognized for compatibility.

A marker phrase that appears only deep in the file body (past the scan window) does not trigger the skip.

To restore the previous behavior and analyze everything, pass --no-skip-generated. To audit which files were excluded, pass --report-skipped; the CLI logs skipped (generated): <path> to stderr for each file.

Project links

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Credits

Author: Calixte Denizet

GitHub Statistics

Data verified by PyPI on Aug 7, 2026
The GitHub source repository was provided by the project maintainers and verified by PyPI at the time of upload. Stars, forks, and open issues/PRs are derived from that repository and have not been independently verified.

License expression

MPL-2.0
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Requires

Python >=3.8

Tags

metrics tree-sitter static-analysis cli

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