vi-inspector

Automated code review for LabVIEW — in CI, without LabVIEW installed.

Point it at your VIs; it flags error-handling defects, broken error chains, race-condition risks, and oversized diagrams. Designed for pull-request gating: stable exit codes, baselines ("fail only on new findings"), SARIF output for GitHub code scanning, and a marketplace-ready GitHub Action.

Quickstart

pip install vi-inspector
vi-inspector review path/to/project --fail-on high

Exit codes: 0 = clean, 1 = new findings at/above --fail-on, 2 = operational error (e.g. a VI failed to parse).

CI usage

- uses: vi-inspector/vi-inspector@v1
  with:
    path: 'src/'
    fail-on: high
    baseline: .vi-inspector-baseline.json
    sarif: true   # needs security-events: write

Adopting on an existing codebase? Bless the current state, then gate on regressions:

vi-inspector review src/ --update-baseline .vi-inspector-baseline.json
# commit the baseline; CI now fails only on NEW findings

Other useful flags: --json, --sarif FILE, --html OUT_DIR, --ignore-parse-errors. Under GITHUB_ACTIONS, file-level ::error/::warning annotations are emitted automatically.

Rule catalog

Precision: every rule was audited against genuine LabVIEW-rendered block diagrams (15 findings sampled, verified by hand). ERR-1 true-positive rate 75%, RACE-1 and CPLX-1 100%. A former WIRE-1 rule ("unwired SubVI inputs") was removed after the audit found 0% actionable hits — method-call nodes expose phantom terminals in the parsed model and the rest were optional-with-defaults noise. A precise version needs cross-VI connector-pane analysis and is tracked as a planned rule.

Compatibility

Verified against 106 real .vi files — see docs/COMPATIBILITY.md:

Untested versions are untested — no claim is made about them.

How it works

• pylabview (MIT) reads the RSRC binary container: version, blocks, connector pane, dependencies.
• lvkit 0.8.6 (Apache-2.0) parses block diagrams semantically (nodes, terminals, wires) and renders diagrams.
• vi_inspector/review.py runs the rules; report.py builds the HTML dashboard.

Development

python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"  # or: pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv/bin/python -m pytest tests/ -q

License

MIT — see LICENSE. "LabVIEW" is a trademark of National Instruments / Emerson; this project is not affiliated with or endorsed by NI or Emerson.