mvt/docs/development.md

Development

The Mobile Verification Toolkit team welcomes contributions of new forensic modules or other contributions which help improve the software.

Local environment

MVT uses uv for dependency management. To install the project and development dependencies from the locked environment, run:

make install

Testing

MVT uses pytest for unit and integration tests. Code style consistency is maintained with ruff and mypy. All can be run automatically with:

make check

Run these tests before making new commits or opening pull requests.

Module dependencies

Modules can require other modules to run first by declaring their classes in dependencies. The command runner uses a stable topological ordering, so the existing module list order is preserved wherever dependency constraints allow.

class DependentModule(MVTModule):
    dependencies = (PrerequisiteModule,)

    def run(self):
        prerequisite_results = self.get_dependency_results(PrerequisiteModule)

Selecting a single module also runs its transitive dependencies. If a dependency is unavailable or the dependency graph contains a cycle, the command logs a warning and does not run any modules.

Profiling

Some MVT modules extract and process significant amounts of data during the analysis process or while checking results against known indicators. Care must be take to avoid inefficient code paths as we add new modules.

MVT modules can be profiled with Python built-in cProfile by setting the MVT_PROFILE environment variable.

MVT_PROFILE=1 dev/mvt-ios check-backup test_backup

Open an issue or PR if you are encountering significant performance issues when analyzing a device with MVT.