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Documentation as Code for Cloud Using PlantUML

by cyneox on 7/30/23, 7:34 PM with 34 comments

• by mikeholler on 7/30/23, 8:37 PM

  One of the coolest things about plantuml is the generated PNG actually contains the source code for the image as metadata. If someone gives you an image, they don't also need to send you the source because you can extract it using the plantuml CLI.

• by jerieljan on 7/31/23, 2:56 AM

  I love PlantUML. I was always fond of it in my early days as a software engineer and still use it today, along with all the various ways to draw diagrams out there, whether it's through a web tool like draw.io or Miro or through markup like PlantUML and Mermaid.

  Some stuff I'd like to share with the rest:

  - PlantUML's default style has improved since the days of red/brown borders, pale yellow boxes, drop shadows and such but I've attempted fixing it before through a preset style [I've made before here](https://gist.github.com/jerieljan/4c82515ff5f2b2e4dd5122d354...). It's obsolete nowadays, since I'm sure someone has made a style generator somewhere, and last I checked, PlantUML allows a monochrome style out of the box.

  - [Eraser](https://app.eraser.io) is promising, considering that it's trying to blend both diagram-as-code markup along with the usual visual diagram editor. I'm still seeing if it's worth picking up since Miro's hard to beat.

  - On an unrelated note, [WikiJS](https://js.wiki/) is a self-hosted wiki that happens to support draw.io, PlantUML and MermaidJS diagrams out of the box. Quite handy to have for your own docs.

  - I use Miro nowadays since it's significantly quicker to draw things freeform and to collaborate live with folks on a whiteboard at the cost of having your diagrams in markup, but it's easy to miss the integration that [you can actually import PlantUML](https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/7004940386578) and Mermaid diagrams in a Miro board too. You can also do edits too, but it's on its own PlantUML section, of course.

• by thangalin on 7/31/23, 8:48 AM

  My cross-platform desktop text editor, KeenWrite, allows users to define variables in an external YAML file. The editor calls out to Kroki[1] to convert text-based diagrams to SVG. The diagrams can reference variables and are rendered using EchoSVG[2].

  KeenWrite[3] can produce PDF documentation from Markdown documents that has PlantUML diagrams with elements stored in an external, machine-readable file. Here are screenshots showing variables on the left, diagram text in the middle, and a real-time render on the right:

  * https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

  * https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/main/...

  KeenWrite supports all diagrams offered by Kroki, which includes "diagram-plantuml".

  [1]: https://kroki.io/

  [2]: https://github.com/css4j/echosvg/

  [3]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

• by jimmcslim on 7/30/23, 9:45 PM

  I'm a big fan of PlantUML. The only issue I have is that the layout algorithm sometimes can be challenging to work with for certain types of diagrams, although this is often due to there being too many nodes in the diagram... so, simplify it?

  Nevertheless one improvement I would like to see for PlantUML (and similar tools like Mermaid) is a way to separate content and style from layout... i.e perhaps have a viewer that can pop up and let the user reorganise the elements and save the absolute positioning to a separate sidecar file?

• by smusamashah on 7/31/23, 12:09 AM

  The list of many PlantUML kind of tools https://xosh.org/text-to-diagram/

• by bjt12345 on 7/31/23, 1:22 AM

  I use PlantUML to create quick network diagrams.

  It's the only solution I found which allows tailoring a diagram if it renders poorly.

  For example, if access switches are to be on the left, and trunk switches on the right, PlantUML is the only solution I found which adequately allows the user to add such constraints, via:

  S1 --E-- S2

• by bluejekyll on 7/30/23, 9:22 PM

  I started using plantuml more rigorously at work. I've found that collaboration on the drawings/diagrams, is simpler and easier as it can be tracked in Git. One additional thing that I've been using as well is the mdBook plugin to embed and render the images as part of a larger book. This has been helpful for large systems when there are many teams involved. We publish the content as github pages on the repos as well.

  I'd like to start doing this with my open-source as well.

  https://github.com/sytsereitsma/mdbook-plantuml

• by s1291 on 7/30/23, 11:56 PM

  Community list of comparisons between Text to Diagram tools: https://text-to-diagram.com/

• by lxe on 7/31/23, 4:07 AM

  Somewhat related thing I've discovered recently that I'm finding tremendously useful: ChatGPT knows plantUML so it can generate amazing diagrams just from your prompt.

• by nextaccountic on 7/31/23, 7:02 AM

  Here's three interesting Rust projects that use plantuml

  You can embed plantuml and drawio diagrams in Rust doc comments and have it rendered in the docs, using this crate

  https://crates.io/crates/rsdoc

  And you can generate plantuml from SQL tables using

  https://crates.io/crates/sqlant (this one is a rust port of a go tool, https://github.com/achiku/planter)

  And you can embed plantuml in mdbook

  https://crates.io/crates/mdbook-plantuml

• by pachico on 7/31/23, 11:36 AM

  I have been using plantuml with Aws icons for years, already. I love it. I can write locally, in gitlab and in Confluence. I can iterate over it and it says right embedded in my docs.

• by gatane on 7/31/23, 12:10 PM

  I used PlantUML for a lab project. I would recommend getting the latest jar version, it has support for themes and a lot of other stuff!

• by pagnol on 7/31/23, 5:57 AM

  For anyone using Emacs Org mode, it may be interesting to know that plantUML diagrams can be embedded in Org documents using Babel.

• by candiddevmike on 7/30/23, 9:47 PM

  What does PlantUML do better than mermaid?

• by rpz on 7/31/23, 4:52 AM

  similieHash(“documentation as code”) == similieHash(“nails as hammer”)