Insider is a belt of tools built on the idea of searching regular expressions in code. Insider is able to detect code smells, the usage of external libraries and the topics that a software project approaches by only using Regex. This means that Insider does not use any type of parsing and is therefore language independent.

To install Insider from Github, please download from the latest release from Github, the insider.zip archive and unzip it to a specific location. The contents of this archive are:

• insider-*.jar - the executable jar file
• insider.bat - a batch script for executing Insider on Windows
• insider.sh - a shell script for executing insider on Windows
• config - a folder for configuration files, described more in the Configuration Section
• results - a folder where Insider will output the results.

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Clone the repository from here.

Run gradle clean build to obtain an executable jar.

Edit the configuration file (config/insider-conf.properties), to specify the root folder of the project's sources.

• In order to find the occurrences of the libraries in the analyzed project. Use the following command (run Insider using the insider.bat or insider.sh script):

insider.sh find config/libraries.json

• Detect Simple Code Smells. Use the following command (run Insider using the insider.bat or insider.sh script):

insider.sh find config/code_smells.json

• You can also run the find command with both files at once:

insider.sh find config/libraries.json config/code_smells.json

The commands will generate two .json files (PROJECT_ID-libraries.json and PROJECT_ID-code_smells.json) in the results folder.

Insider is also a Voyager Instrument. To configure Insider from Voyager you can add the following fields in the mission.yml file:

# A map of instrument names to commands and parameters.
# When 'runsAll' is false the mission will run only the instruments
# with the commands declared here, in this order.
instruments:
  insider:
    # A map of parameter name to value
    # Only add the parameters you want to override (the default values are written here)
    parameters:
      max-heap: 4g # will configure the maximum heap space the jvm process will get. For large process may be needed to be set to 16g or higher
      findConfig: 'config/fingerprints/code_smells.json config/fingerprints/libraries.json' # a space separated list of insider fingerprints
      inspectConfig: 'config/rules' # a space separated list of folders or Application Inspector specific rules, like the ones here: https://github.com/microsoft/ApplicationInspector/tree/main/AppInspector/rules/default

# A map of environment variables, name to value, for voyager missions
# overwrites the variables from global config, instrument and command
# Only set the environment variables you need.
environment:
  INSIDER_LANGUAGES: 'java,c++,c#' # a comma separated list of the languages to analyse (just a sample example)
  INSIDER_LINGUIST_FILE: "${instrument}/languages.yml" # a file containing languages to extension mappings according to [GitHub Linguist](https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/languages.yml)
  INSIDER_DEPEXT_MAX_NAMESPACE_LENGTH: 200 # the maximum length of a namespace for DepExt analysis

The inspect command is inspired by the Application Inspector project created by Microsoft. Insider even uses the same input files as Application Inspector.