Can Cartographer help identify potential breaking changes?

Yes, with its Instant Impact Analysis feature, Cartographer allows you to quickly identify 'what would break if I change this service?' by providing immediate insights into its forward, reverse, and transitive dependencies.

What is Cartographer and what does it do?

Cartographer is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that automatically crawls your GitLab groups to build a comprehensive service catalog and detailed dependency graphs of your entire architecture.

How does Cartographer help AI coding assistants?

It provides AI coding assistants, like Claude Code, with instant, up-to-date knowledge of your services and their dependencies. This eliminates the need to repeatedly explain your architecture, making AI interactions more efficient and effective.

What kind of information does Cartographer collect about services?

Cartographer collects rich metadata including service names, descriptions, README content, latest versions, lifecycle status, and allows for custom definitions of service types, owners, and dependencies through `.cartographer.yaml` files.

Is Cartographer compatible with self-hosted GitLab instances?

Absolutely. Cartographer can be configured to crawl self-hosted GitLab instances by simply setting the `GITLAB_URI` environment variable to your specific GitLab instance URL.

Cartographer: GitLab Service Catalog & Dependency Graphs for AI

Cartographer is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server designed to empower AI coding assistants with immediate, deep knowledge of your organization's software architecture. By automatically crawling GitLab groups, it discovers all projects, extracts rich metadata, and maps out intricate service dependencies. Developers can leverage Cartographer to instantly query service details, understand forward and reverse dependencies, perform impact analysis, and enrich auto-discovered data with human-defined contexts via `.cartographer.yaml` files. This eliminates the need to repeatedly explain your architecture to AI, enabling more efficient and accurate AI-assisted development workflows.

Key Features

01Automatic Service Discovery from GitLab groups

020 GitHub stars

03Detailed Dependency Graphs (forward, reverse, transitive)

04Rich Metadata Collection (README, versions, descriptions, lifecycle)

05Support for `.cartographer.yaml` for custom metadata and dependencies

06Instant Impact Analysis to identify service breaking changes

Use Cases

01Discovering services based on criteria like type, lifecycle, or tags

02Querying specific service details and their dependencies

03Answering "what would break if I change this service?" instantly