A source code mutation/transformation framework
Project description
HELIX
A source code mutation/transformation framework.
Description
HELIX defines three major primitives:
Blueprints
Core project layouts including templated boilerplate and methods for generating and building artifacts from a set of Components and Transforms.
Components
Small, configurable pieces of source code that represent a specific implementation of a specific functionality along with associated metadata.
Transforms
Modifications of either source code or a built artifact along with associated metadata.
Blueprints are configured with a collection of Components to include and Transforms to apply and then built to generate build artifacts.
Installation
Install HELIX from PyPI with pip, run:
pip install helix
Dependencies
Some Blueprints, Components, and Transforms include additional, non-python
dependencies that must be installed separately. These can be installed
automatically (if supported) with the install
command. For example, to
install dependencies for the upx
Transform, run:
helix install transforms upx
To install all dependencies for all installed Blueprints, Components, and Transforms, run:
helix install
Note: some Blueprints, Components, and Transforms include dependencies which
must be manually installed. Using the install
command for these will instead
list the dependencies that must be installed manually.
Usage
To list currently installed parts of HELIX:
helix list
To generate a single build, use the build
command. For example, to generate a
build using the cmake-cpp
blueprint, with the configuration-example
component (setting the second_word
parameter to foo
), and apply the strip
transform (on supported platforms), writing output files to ./example
:
helix build blueprint cmake-cpp ./example \
-c configuration-example:second_word=foo \
-t strip
The build
command also supports loading a configuration from a JSON file and
HELIX is fairly scriptable. See the examples/
directory or take a look at the
full documentation for more.
Contributing
HELIX is designed to be easily extensible via entry points. Blueprints, Components, and Transforms simply need to conform to their respective abstract base classes and be exposed under their respective entry point (see the Getting Started section of the documentation for more details and a tutorial). External Blueprints, Components, and Transforms that are correctly exposed are usable in all normal HELIX commands.
Development
To set up a development environment, first clone this repo. Next, it is useful to install HELIX in editable mode with extras for development and testing:
pip install -e .[development,testing]
When developing new components it can be helpful to use HELIX's build
command
in verbose mode so that you can see compiler and linker output and correct any
errors you may encounter:
helix build blueprint cmake-cpp novel-component -c novel-component -v
Documentation
To build the full HELIX documentation, after installing HELIX with
development
extras enabled, from the docs/
directory, run:
make html
Or other supported Sphinx output formats.
Testing
You can expose tests for your Components and Transforms by adding a subclass of
helix.tests.UnitTestCase
to the entrypoint helix.tests
. Some useful testing
mixins are provided in helix/tests.py
and for some examples see the tests
referenced in setup.py
.
To test the HELIX interfaces and utilities, run:
helix test system
To test Components, Blueprints, and Transforms, run:
helix test unit
Disclaimer
DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A. Approved for public release: distribution unlimited.
© 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Subject to FAR 52.227-11 – Patent Rights – Ownership by the Contractor (May 2014)
- SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
This material is based upon work supported by the Department of Defense under Air Force Contract No. FA8721-05-C-0002 and/or FA8702-15-D-0001. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense.
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