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Getting Started

DCM (formerly Dart Code Metrics) is a tool that helps improve the quality and consistency of Dart code by identifying and reporting problems, such as bugs and code that doesn't follow best practices.

It also collects analytical data on the code through calculating code metrics and can be configured to set thresholds for these metrics.

To learn more about the tool capabilities, see the Core Concepts documentation.

Installation​

The installation process is similar to the Dart SDK.

First, download the executable for your platform:

You can install the DCM executable using Chocolatey.

To install the executable:

C:/> choco install dcm

To upgrade the executable:

C:/> choco upgrade dcm

If you can't use the executables, add it to your PATH:

  1. In the Windows search box, type env.
  2. Click Edit the system environment variables.
  3. Click Environment Variables….
  4. In the user variable section, select Path and click Edit….
  5. Click New, and enter the path to the executable.
  6. In each window that you just opened, click Apply or OK to dismiss it and apply the path change.

You can also download the .zip archive with executable from our GitHub.

And then install the VS Code extension or IntelliJ / Android Studio plugin (depending on what IDE you use).

System requirements:

  • 64-bit Windows OS, Linux OS or macOS system
  • Installed Dart / Flutter SDK

Activating the license​

After the installation of the executable and the IDE extension it's required to activate the tool. This is a one time operation.

To activate the license use dcm activate --license-key=YOUR_KEY CLI command or IDEs extension command DCM: Activate license key.

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License activation uses the device id, so attempts to activate a license multiple times on the same device won't subtract the activations count.

Running executable on CI/CD​

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CI/CD integration is available only for the Teams version

In order to run commands on CI, instead of using dcm activate it is expected that each command will be called with --ci-key and --email options. For example, dcm analyze --ci-key=YOUR_CI_KEY --email=LICENSE_EMAIL.

Alternatively, you can set DCM_CI_KEY and DCM_EMAIL env variables and they will be picked up automatically.

Migrating from plugin version​

If you're migrating from the plugin version, follow these steps:

  1. Remove DCM as your package dependency.
  2. Remove DCM from the plugins section of the analysis_options.yaml. All other configuration can be left unchanged.
  3. Instead of calling dart pub run dart_code_metrics:metrics analyze lib simply call dcm analyze lib.
  4. Update CI/CD to also call dcm executable.

If you any feedback about the migration process or the tool, please join our Discord server or send us a message.

Integrating DCM into an existing project​

DCM provides a command to generate a baseline. All the issues included onto the baseline file won't be reported by IDE and CLI. After which you can gradually remove generated issues from the file and fix them.

Read more about the command to generate the baseline.

There are other techniques available that can help you with the integration. You can learn more about them here.

Next Steps​