Desnarl documentation

Desnarl traces impact, consumers, and schema references across every repo in your workspace — self-hosted, on your own infrastructure. In a polyrepo codebase, "what would changing this affect?" normally means grepping across every sibling checkout by hand, and easily missing a consumer that imports a symbol under a name you didn't think to search for. Desnarl answers that in one call, by resolving real import/export edges, shared package.json dependencies, and SQL schema references across every sibling repo checked out under your workspace root.

Start with Getting started → Install, then Self-hosted deployment once you're ready to run Desnarl continuously against your own repos in CI.

:::note Naming: Desnarl vs. crossrepo-graph "Desnarl" is the public product name. The self-hosted server underneath it keeps its original engineering name, crossrepo-graph, in a few places that are safe (and expected) to see throughout this documentation: the three MCP tool names (crossrepo_impact, crossrepo_consumers, crossrepo_schema_refs) and on-disk paths (.crossrepo-graph/graph.db, .crossrepo-graph/query-log.jsonl, .crossrepo-graph/repos/). That isn't inconsistent documentation — it's the actual package name, left as-is rather than renamed for the docs. :::

What Desnarl is not

• Not a hosted service. Desnarl runs entirely on infrastructure you control — see Self-hosted deployment for exactly which network calls it makes and why.
• Not real data-flow tracing. Cross-repo resolution follows literal symbol names across a re-export chain — a genuinely useful heuristic, not a type-checker. See the MCP tool reference for what that does and doesn't catch.
• Not usage-metered or repo-count-tiered. See the licensing & pricing FAQ.