helix 1.2.0

Description:

helix 1.2.0

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.
MIT License