Measure a project

From the root of the project, with nothing set up:

kalku run lib/thing.ex        # measure one file

A project without a .kalku.toml is measured as it is and left as it is. The run says so, and says where it keeps what it needs:

kalku: no .kalku.toml in this directory: measuring it as elixir and leaving it as it is. What the run keeps is in $TMPDIR/kalku/thing; `kalku init` sets the project up to keep it.

That place is the reni, under the temporary directory of your machine (written here as $TMPDIR; the real message shows the whole path). Nothing is written in the project: not its mix.exs, not its mix.lock, not a file beside them.

The Elixir kalku runs inside the project it measures: that is how it loads a wekufe into a warm BEAM instead of rebuilding. For a project that does not depend on it, the run fetches kalku_elixir from Hex into the reni, in its own version, and builds it there with the project’s Elixir.

Start with one file and a limit

A first whole-project run on a real codebase is long, and there is nothing to learn from it that a single file does not already show.

kalku run lib/thing.ex --limit 6 --verbose

--limit caps how many wekufe are cast (100 unless told otherwise, 0 for all of them) and --verbose says what the run is doing while it does it. What a run tells you explains how to read the result.

Keep kalku in the project

To keep kalku in a project, with a configuration the team shares, equivalents that are argued and recorded, and a gate in CI, set it up:

kalku init                    # detects Elixir, writes .kalku.toml and .kalku/summon
mix deps.get

init reads the project’s own markers (mix.exs, kai.toml, Cargo.toml, pyproject.toml, pom.xml or the Gradle files), says what it found, and writes .kalku.toml plus a .kalku/summon script holding whatever the toolchain needs to start the kalku with a clean protocol channel.

It never writes over a file that is there, and it never edits the build file that decides what a project depends on: it prints the line to add and says why. The page of kalku init shows its whole output, and Configuration the file it leaves.