15 ms·

Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software

389 points by davesailer 5y ago

tandav 5y ago
btw python wrapper is awesome: https://graphviz.readthedocs.io https://graphviz.readthedocs.io
- erwincoumans 5y ago
  Look nice a simple! Minor nit: I wish they could have added an option to statically link graphviz/dot, so the pip install became fully self contained.
graderjs 5y ago
I used Graphviz years ago to generate diagrams for NLP structures, and other visualizations. It was the only thing that could do what I needed. I ended up moving to Processing/P5 to create "spring physics" interactive graphs, then wrote my own eigenvector embedding visualization that could project into 3D space and had a moveable camera so you could fly around with WASD and mouse. Cool stuff! Graph visualization and 3d graphics was a fun rabbit hole
- happylion0801 5y ago
  Do you happen to have any open source code for this that I could look at. I am looking to do some interactive graph viz and would love to see if there is something I could reference
  - graderjs 5y ago
    Sure. Let me look it up. It should be all here, at my OpenProcessing (at least all the code I wrote for myself personally): https://openprocessing.org/user/15252?view=sketches https://openprocessing.org/user/15252?view=sketches Basically any sketch that has "3d" or "aspekt" in the title is on that track. But you can also see from the thumbnail many of them are 3d world related. The navigation of that site is pretty tricky...but you can find the source code by: - Click on a sketch - Click on the 'abacus' control menu to the right - Click on the files tab in that Source code in Java should be available there. Please remember it requires a version of Processing in Java to work. I worked on this in 2011/2012 so you may need to figure out which Processing version that is. Also, here's a youtube video of flying around one of my sketches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNshrYO7Kf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNshrYO7Kf4 and here are some more videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw-6wNeif6-l7oqippdORcw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw-6wNeif6-l7oqippdORcw
    - happylion0801 5y ago
      Thank you, those look really nice, appreciate the links :). I have used processing before so atleast some of it should be familiar.
TruffleLabs 5y ago
I used this to generate relationship diagrams between companies, adding in projects and who is working on what; the final image was a map of an ecosystem of that set of businesses.
nyellin 5y ago
Here are some cool things I've done recently with graphviz: 1. Draw "sketch" style graphs using https://sketchviz.com/new https://sketchviz.com/new 2. Draw graphs of memory usage in golang programs (using pprof): https://graphviz.org/Gallery/directed/pprof.html https://graphviz.org/Gallery/directed/pprof.html 3. Embed graphviz into Sphinx docs (shameless self-promotion: https://docs.robusta.dev/master/catalog/triggers/index.html#trigger-hierarchy https://docs.robusta.dev/master/catalog/triggers/index.html#...)
- taubek 5y ago
  I like the output of Sketchviz. Do yo know if it is possible do make such output directly from desktop app?
  - nyellin 5y ago
    Sadly I haven't found a way. Let me know if you do
    - taubek 5y ago
      Will do.
  - fsiefken 5y ago
    you can install it locally with docker https://github.com/iamacarpet/sketchviz-docker https://github.com/iamacarpet/sketchviz-docker
    - taubek 5y ago
      Thanks! Docker makes my computer so slow... And it would probably be an over kill for me. But it is nice to know that it exists.
  - chuchana 5y ago
    Haven't tried it yet, but this looks pretty spot on: https://github.com/gpotter2/sketchviz https://github.com/gpotter2/sketchviz
enter-haken 5y ago
I use graphviz to get a quick postgresql schema overview (good for small to medium databases) https://github.com/enter-haken/schema https://github.com/enter-haken/schema
- kh1 5y ago
  That looks really cool. Would you possibly share the script?
  - enter-haken 5y ago
    It's part of the repo. https://github.com/enter-haken/schema/blob/master/schema.sh https://github.com/enter-haken/schema/blob/master/schema.sh It's a mixture of sed, awk and sql.
    - kh1 5y ago
      Oh I did take a quick look at the repo but didn't notice it was in the SQL. Thank you!
- magicpointer 5y ago
  In a similar vein there is Schemaspy[1]. It generates a static documentation website for your DB, which also uses GraphViz to build ER diagrams. [1] https://github.com/schemaspy/schemaspy https://github.com/schemaspy/schemaspy
- ccakes 5y ago
  Autogenerated database documentation is often pretty hit and miss but tbls[1] does a pretty good job in that space. Especially when you comment on your tables, fields, views, functions etc (which is a good habit anyway!) the output is quite useful [1] https://github.com/k1LoW/tbls https://github.com/k1LoW/tbls
bhaak 5y ago
The history and majors relationships between NetHack and its forks are visualized with graphviz. https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Variant https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Variant
ngcc_hk 5y ago
Javascript and html version needed.
- kjhughes 5y ago
  - Dagre (deprecated, unfortunately): https://github.com/dagrejs https://github.com/dagrejs - Viz.js (via Emscripten): https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js; Online demo: http://viz-js.com/ http://viz-js.com/
  - dylanowen 5y ago
    Viz.js had some hard coded memory limits last time I checked. You can work around them on load, but it's annoying. Edit: GraphQL Voyager has the memory increase hack https://github.com/APIs-guru/graphql-voyager/blob/54a178142ae8554c41c92e785ea8886f18927017/src/utils/index.ts#L21 https://github.com/APIs-guru/graphql-voyager/blob/54a178142a...
  - AtNightWeCode 5y ago
    I think dagre was ok but oversold the quality of the algos it used a bit. In many cases it can be better to use a SVG file generated from Graphviz directly instead.
  - tunesmith 5y ago
    An alternative to dagre-d3 is d3-dag: https://github.com/erikbrinkman/d3-dag https://github.com/erikbrinkman/d3-dag I've had good success with cytoscapejs as well, integrating with react so the graph will animate layout on transition. I use elk, which is apparently superior to sugiyama (the algorithm graphviz uses for force-directed dag layouts).
- dylanowen 5y ago
  https://github.com/hpcc-systems/hpcc-js-wasm https://github.com/hpcc-systems/hpcc-js-wasm was pretty easy to integrate into my last project
  - RBerenguel 5y ago
dzyanis 5y ago
I used it for visualization on my project https://github.com/srce/roadmap/blob/master/stacks/java/data/roadmap.svg https://github.com/srce/roadmap/blob/master/stacks/java/data... .XML -> Python script -> .DOT -> Graphviz -> *.SVG It's very useful and probably the best example of using DOT language, unfortunately.
pydry 5y ago
Anybody know what the best visual editor is? Web or desktop.
- skewbone 5y ago
  Graphviz ships with a tool called dotty that can be used for visual graph editing. It's a bit cumbersome but does work. https://www.graphviz.org/pdf/dottyguide.pdf https://www.graphviz.org/pdf/dottyguide.pdf Edit: I don't know of a really good visual tool as I've found text editing .dot files directly with a live visualization pretty nice. I use graphviz pretty regularly.
dylanowen 5y ago
Graphviz is one of my favorite tools. I use it for most of my diagraming https://github.com/dylanowen/mdbook-graphviz https://github.com/dylanowen/mdbook-graphviz and I use it as debugging output when I'm working through graph problems.
- Thiez 5y ago
  Likewise! I have used it to easily visualize dependency graphs at multiple employers. The pictures can get a bit messy when they're very large, but they were amazing for detecting incorrect/missing dependencies.
erwincoumans 5y ago
I love the Doxygen dependency graphs, using dot/Graphviz. Wow, 1999, 23 years old, like the first Matrix movie...
AtNightWeCode 5y ago
A true classic! Powerful, yet very easy to learn.
mdtrooper 5y ago
Graphviz is another "heart bleed" / "log4j" / ... Because a lot of big companies use it (and they spend 0 €/$/... in the project), and it is broken from several years...
- lloydatkinson 5y ago
  Broken how?
- _joel 5y ago
  I'm failing to see a vector here?
- graphviz 5y ago
  Author(s) here We do voluntarily act on CERT advisories. But, true.
motohagiography 5y ago
Graphviz is an amazing tool, it has just suffered from being cloistered to technologists whose jobs aren't to solve the kinds of problems it is specifically adapted for. I use graphs in security and privacy quite a bit, and even built the tech for a hopeful security platform using a graph back end. They yield the fastest path through complex problems, and I use them to do in a couple of hours what typically would take client staff months. They're really compelling but oddly unpopular. Imo, they're useful for one-off pattern discovery, and they're most valuable for finding single or a few exceptions and outliers in normalized data, and you need to be in an environment where there are asymmetric returns on finding those. Surveillance seems to be their default use case, with open ended scientific research a close second. This comes up with graph based recommendation engines, which are essentially a surveillance/marketing product based on preferences. Most businesses aren't based on discovery of anything other than customers for a transaction they already have. These aren't problems engineers typically solve, which are more about scaling and optimizing, they're more marketing and sales problems, where you're looking for exceptions and opportunities. (security and privacy are the complementary antithesis of these) A graph based product (imo) is ideal for product marketing analysts optimizing for customer preferences and discovery. From a product perspective, graphs are analogous to ML, where you'd use a clustering algorithm on loosely structured data to yield categories, comparisons, and implied relationships, whereas a graph yields the same thing over the structured normalized data you can feed into it once you have imagined an ontology to fit it.
- lizen_one 5y ago
  That sounds really interesting! Can you give a few more details how you use Graphviz? How does it give such a great advantage "to do in a couple of hours what typically would take client staff months." Did I understand it correctly that you use it to discover patterns? Are these patterns discovered by just using the layout engines? Arent' other tools, e.g. networkx in Python or cytoscape in javascript easier to use interactively in a REPL? What is the typical workflow (maybe plot, find interesting pattern, change query/data in a loop)? I'm really interested in how Graphviz can be so great. I am currently working with the other mentioned tools for visualization purposes.
janto 5y ago
https://plantuml.com https://plantuml.com graphs look much better
- rwoerz 5y ago
  PlantUML depends on GraphViz (https://plantuml.com/en/graphviz-dot https://plantuml.com/en/graphviz-dot)
  - janto 5y ago
    For some of its diagrams, yes. And yet PlantUML results still look better. I think the problem is that Graphviz's glyphs are somewhat crude.
dddddaviddddd 5y ago
Graphviz made it really easy for me to plot dependencies in Go data structures! After I put together a lexer, Graphviz took care of all the difficult work of making sense of the data: https://github.com/davidschlachter/embedded-struct-visualizer https://github.com/davidschlachter/embedded-struct-visualize...
jonstewart 5y ago
My team uses a succinct graphviz dot file to note the dependencies between different git repositories. This is then used by the build system to figure out what needs to be rebuilt. There are lots of other ways to skin this cat, this is just the method we chose, and it's oddly pleasing.
paphillips 5y ago
I've used GraphViz a number of times and highly recommend it as a standard tool on your belt. Having a stand-alone executable that can export to SVG is great. The most complex thing I've done with it [1]: a tool (MIT-license) that builds diagrams of the data and addressing pipeline for a DSP processor, and lets one 'scrub through' the assembler code frame by frame and see the values propagate through the blocks. Also PlantUML [2] uses it for most diagrams. Getting layout and positioning the way you want can be tricky but is usually achievable with patience and hidden objects. [1] https://github.com/paphillips/DFB https://github.com/paphillips/DFB [2] https://plantuml.com/graphviz-dot https://plantuml.com/graphviz-dot
- thrwawy283 5y ago
  My graphviz-fu got so much better when I started using invisible objects for the grid-like layouts. At that point you're just using graphviz for positioning/spacing/styling instead of creating the overall topology.
  - buzzwordninja 5y ago
    This sounds interesting, can you expand on that a bit please?
    - thrwawy283 5y ago
      You're handing graphviz a list of relationships. Sometimes you know the ideal way to visualize this is a tree, or something with right angles, but graphviz isn't laying it out that neatly. So you create extra nodes, and edges to those nodes, so that graphviz considers it a "balanced" tree or grid. Then you use styling to turn those nodes invisible (showing just the nodes/edges you want). Once I have this correct I usually contain it within a "cluster", and then link that cluster to the larger diagram.
    - pvaldes 5y ago
      if you want X nodes falling near in the graph you just put them into a box with white lines and they move as one from this point. Can be made with the cluster environment.
nsajko 5y ago
A fast interactive 3D alternative for visualizing large graphs is Graphia: https://github.com/graphia-app/graphia https://github.com/graphia-app/graphia https://graphia.app https://graphia.app However, it's currently suffering from the Qt switch from 5 to 6. Regarding Graphviz itself, I wonder why is there no special layout logic for planar graphs? They can be recognized and embedded on the plane in linear time without intersecting edges, so it would be very nice if some of the Graphviz tools actually did that. A recent set of minimal graph coloring Graphviz visualizations of mine: https://gitlab.com/nsajko/example_optimally_colored_graphs https://gitlab.com/nsajko/example_optimally_colored_graphs
_joel 5y ago
It's great to see it still going. Used it for Puppet as well as dpkg output (we made a full dependency list of our multimedia ingest application, i.e. lots of custom ffmpeg and libboost etc). That thing was huge
indentit 5y ago
I've never been that happy with the output from any of the different graphviz engines. I'd like to see a UI graph editing tool which can import and export .dot format, but also allows manually moving nodes (which I guess wouldn't get exported unless arbitrary metadata is supported), and ofc exports to svg. Maybe there's already something similar I haven't stumbled across yet? I guess my use case is mainly swimlanes and places where nodes don't have to have the same rank.
- nyellin 5y ago
  Totally agree with this. I always want to start with graphviz but then modify the output afterwards to fix the layout
  - taeric 5y ago
    I mentioned this in another thread. You can have the output be a dot file. Which you can then edit and send back with a flag to not redo the layout.
    - nyellin 5y ago
      That's a wonderful tip, thank you!
      - taeric 5y ago
        Hope it helps! There used to be a program called dotty, looks like it was basically abandoned, though. :(
        bakul 5y ago
        it’s there in the graphviz github repo.
        taeric 5y ago
        But it is only x11, right? Not sure how well it is supported on the platforms you can run it on. And I don't have x on my work computer.
phkahler 5y ago
Always wanted a way to (have GCC?) send a call graph to graphviz. A reduced version indicating calls across files would also be useful. I get that polymorphism can mess that up, so maybe just link callers to the base class in those cases.
- leni536 5y ago
  I remember being able to set that up with clang (obviously not indirect calls).
tonerow 5y ago
Way fewer features but probably easier to use ~> https://flowchart.fun https://flowchart.fun Exports to SVG, PNG, JPG
- pc86 5y ago
  This looks cool and like a novel way to generate the graphs, I'll have to take a look
ncc-erik 5y ago
I maintain an open-source project [1] that uses graphs to model data. I wanted to make my project as accessible as possible, so Graphviz was perfect since it's dead-simple to install and use on all major OS platforms. [1] https://github.com/nccgroup/PMapper https://github.com/nccgroup/PMapper
karlicoss 5y ago
Graphviz is awesome! Here are a couple of my diagrams: https://beepb00p.xyz/blog-graph.html https://beepb00p.xyz/blog-graph.html -- graph of my blog pages with tags/connections between posts, generated with a DSL-ish python script https://github.com/karlicoss/beepb00p/blob/master/misc/index.py https://github.com/karlicoss/beepb00p/blob/master/misc/index... https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html -- map of my personal data & infrastructure (discussed a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26269832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26269832 ). Also a similar DSL https://github.com/karlicoss/myinfra/blob/master/generate.py https://github.com/karlicoss/myinfra/blob/master/generate.py The main downside for me is that sometimes it gets the positioning wrong, and you can see how it can be easily fixed, but it's hard to convince graphviz to actually do so. Basically I'd love a tool where I can do 10% of positioning manually and let the rest be constraint based like in graphviz.
- taeric 5y ago
  It used to have a built in tool to move nodes it has placed. All I can find scanning the docs right now is the -n flag to neato, which will honor existing pos fields. Edit: dotty is what I was trying to remember.
justsomehnguy 5y ago
PSGraph is a PowerShell module to dynamically generate dot files. I used it (with a various degree of success) to plot some diagrams for my personal usage. https://github.com/KevinMarquette/PSGraph https://github.com/KevinMarquette/PSGraph
soheil 5y ago
At what point does one say maybe a static svg isn't the right way to display that much complexity [0]? [0] https://graphviz.org/Gallery/twopi/twopi2.svg https://graphviz.org/Gallery/twopi/twopi2.svg
omegote 5y ago
I've used Graphviz for many years and my main gripe with it is the lack of customization. Yes, there's "some" customization, but there's a point (not too far from the initial style) where, if you don't like the output, you're out of luck and might as well redraw it using draw.io or some other WYSIWYG editor.
- lmeyerov 5y ago
  Graph viz is admirably powerful, even here. The main techniques seem to be invisible objects and custom code, in case that helps. The cassowary solver group in Australia (I'm blanking on the university, Monash?) goes further via custom constraint logic, and I believe iOS layouts were deeply inspired, and maybe even had one of their students. Graph technologies are tricky to build up -- you can go deep in many areas like this. Afaict, AT&T/Bell Research used to be the main developers of graphviz, and when that corporate lab thinned out, so did graph viz development. A similar story happened with gephi devs when they left their universities (was popular in social data), and cytoscape (popular in bio) is still largely at that fragile state. We are historically big contributors to OSS at Graphistry, but saw the history of funding issues in this space, and how each tool reached a frustratingly low ceiling due to it. We decided to not start as open core, and instead made a free GPU tier + release individual pieces as OSS (Apache Arrow's JS tier, etc) + initially charge for GPU code, until we could build + grow more commercially targeted parts. Thankfully, we are getting to the point of enough sustainable revenue that we are pushing much more to our OSS libs now, and one of our OSS pushes for 2022 will be moving custom (GPU-accelerated) traditional layouts & AI layouts to the OSS lib pygraphistry :) A request we get often get for pygraphistry and our file uploader UI is dotfile (and graphml/gexf) conversion/ingest for then viewing+editing in our scalable interactive graph renderer, so we have been thinking of adding a pygraphistry example just to demonstrate the OSS flow!
ggerganov 5y ago
For the ASCII lovers, I made this simple web page to help convert dot to text diagrams: https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com It's useful to embed diagrams directly in source code for example. Here is a sample [0]: 0.6 ┌─────────────────────────┐ ▼ │ ┌───┐ 0.8 ┌───┐ 0.1 ┌───┐ 0.7 ┌───┐ 0.2 ┌───┐ │ d │ ─────▶ │ │ ◀───── │ e │ ─────▶ │ a │ ─────▶ │ b │ └───┘ │ c │ └───┘ └───┘ └───┘ │ │ 0.4 │ │ │ ◀──────────────────────────────────┘ └───┘ And a more complex example from a project of mine [1]: ┌─────────────┐ │ @tweet2doom │ │ │ │ ROOT │ ◀─────┐ └─────────────┘ │ ▲ │ │ │ │ │ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ │ @player1 │ │ @player2 │ │ │ │ │ │ /play 50-u │ │ /play 30-l,50-f │ └─────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ ▲ ▲ │ │ │ │ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ │ @tweet2doom │ │ @tweet2doom │ │ │ │ │ │ Video │ │ Video │ │ │ │ │ │ Start: 1 │ │ Start: 1 │ │ End:50 │ │ End:80 │ └─────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ ▲ │ │ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ │ @tweet2doom │ │ │ │ │ │ @player2 │ │ Video │ │ │ │ │ │ /play 30-l │ │ Start: 80 │ │ │ │ End:110 │ ──▶ │ │ └─────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ [0] https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com/?src_hash=476410d3 https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com/?src_hash=476410d3 [1] https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com/?src_hash=1ee7dcfe https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com/?src_hash=1ee7dcfe
- cjlm 5y ago
  I love this and wrote about it in my newsletter on network thinking [0] – thank you! [0] https://sourcetarget.email/editions/17/ https://sourcetarget.email/editions/17/
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  If you're on mobile you're going to want to rotate your phone.
GuB-42 5y ago
One of my favorite applications of graphviz https://anidb.net/anime/715/relation/graph https://anidb.net/anime/715/relation/graph It is a great tool to have, it makes drawing complex diagrams manageable.
mLuby 5y ago
GraphViz is great, like Markdown. I recommend https://edotor.net https://edotor.net for online use: 1. No set-up, no accounts/registration. 2. Free, no ads. 3. Simple, pleasant UI with variable/keyword autocompletion and even multi-cursor find/replace! 4. Your graph is saved in the URL so sharing the link lets others play with a copy of your graph. I usually link-shorten the URLs since they're long: https://bit.ly/edotor-example-1 https://bit.ly/edotor-example-1 https://bit.ly/edotor-example-2 https://bit.ly/edotor-example-2
tokumei 5y ago
Graphviz has really helped me in the past with troubleshooting giant CMake projects with lots of dependencies.
mbostock 5y ago
I love Graphviz! It’s in the Observable standard library as the dot tagged template literal, powered by Viz.js. https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/dot https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/dot Here’s a recent example where I used it to figure out why certain dependencies are in my node_modules: https://twitter.com/mbostock/status/1479693504511053824 https://twitter.com/mbostock/status/1479693504511053824
- jahewson 5y ago
  Is there a fork of viz.js that’s still maintained? The original was abandoned in 2018.
  - JohnHaugeland 5y ago
    no. two steps above the abandoned version, before the web threads attempt, works quite nicely.
    - funstuff007 5y ago
      two commits previous or two releases previous to final version?
- rgovostes 5y ago
  That said, compared to the visual clarity of most of the visualizations you share, the graphs that come out of Graphviz are pretty hard to read. If you zoom in and pan around you can easily get disoriented in some patch of nothing but spaghetti lines. This is definitely an area where some mbostock magic would be of huge benefit.
l0b0 5y ago
Graphviz is one of my favourite tools, but I use it very rarely. I noticed a mention of support for UTF-8 and some great documentation layout improvements, but what are the other big features that have been implemented in the last few years?
- graphviz 5y ago
  Most of the work has been on CI/CD, Windows, rationalizing and modernizing the code, and Zheng, Pawar and Goodman contributed a stochastic gradient descent solver, described here, https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04626 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04626 with benefits pointed out by Börsig, Brandes and Pasztor https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.10376 https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.10376 but it's not a default solver, you'd have to ask for it. Great people joined (took over?) the project and have done an amazing job of triage on open bugs, and some were even fixed. We rewrote parts of the network simplex solver to eliminate some of the dumbfounding "trouble in init_rank" errors. We have a long wish list, and are hoping for funding to do some of this work.
dang 5y ago
Past related threads: How Graphviz thinks the USA is laid out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25611053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25611053 - Jan 2021 (80 comments) Create diagrams with code using Graphviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475225 - June 2020 (211 comments) Graphviz – Graph Visualization Software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797932 - Dec 2018 (3 comments) Show HN: Project Management as Code with Graphviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15950325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15950325 - Dec 2017 (64 comments) A Quick Introduction to Graphviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324883 - Sept 2017 (44 comments) A Technique for Drawing Directed Graphs (1993) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14568180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14568180 - June 2017 (11 comments) What happened to GraphViz? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11265188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11265188 - March 2016 (2 comments) Ask HN: What is your favorite application of Graphviz? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790668 - Aug 2009 (8 comments) There have been others, of course, but these seem to be the ones most focused on Graphviz itself.
technimad 5y ago
Many moons ago I created all graphs in the LPIC2 exam prep book [1] using graphviz. The book is open sourced now, and all dot files are preserved in the accompanying repo [2]. One thing I learned creating these graphs was that with some tinkering you have quite a lot of control on how the result will look, without littering the semantic in the source file with a lot of markup. I choose graphviz because the dot notation can easily be checked into source control. It is also easy to create reproducible results using a makefile. [1] https://lpic2book.github.io/src/ https://lpic2book.github.io/src/ [2] https://github.com/lpic2book/src/tree/main/docs/images https://github.com/lpic2book/src/tree/main/docs/images
thangalin 5y ago
My text editor, KeenWrite[0] renders Graphviz diagrams in near real-time. KeenWrite extends the functionality a little by allowing the use of variables inside the diagrams. In the example diagram[1], the 350 value stems from a variable and its value is shown near the top. [0]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite [1]: https://i.ibb.co/CVfsJDh/hacker-news.png https://i.ibb.co/CVfsJDh/hacker-news.png
srinathkrishna 5y ago
I've long marveled on of my ex-colleagues graphviz-fu. He'd whip out a new graphviz online doc and explain an architecture through it. Helped a ton during the pandemic as we were all remote.
graphviz 5y ago
Author(s) here. Ask us anything.
- pezo1919 5y ago
  May I ask about the official and unoffical(?) ways of interactivity in browser (or elsewhere)? Is there some nice goto material on that?
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  How come the graph edges are "--" and the digraph edges are "->", but not "<-"? That means it's not possible to flip graph/digraph to see how it looks with/without arrows, but naievely it doesn't seem that the difference makes any difference except making that difficult, if the connections must always be written left to right. (I've not used more advanced features, so it could be that it does more, or could be that it was built expecting people to know what they want first, which would all be fine)
undershirt 5y ago
Did anyone see the new pathing algorithm for connecting graph nodes that made some rounds on twitter? It looked way better than a normal force-directed graph. I can’t remember what it was exactly, and have lost the reference, but it was a side effect of solving what looked like a traffic problem.
- inciampati 5y ago
  Stochastic gradient descent optimization of the layout based on distances in walks in the graph?
- graphviz 5y ago
  Do you mean Yu, Schumacher and Crane's repulsive curves, as shown in figure 26 of https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/RepulsiveCurves/RepulsiveCurves.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/RepulsiveCurves/Rep... ?
  - undershirt 5y ago
    that's it, thank you! i suppose graphviz will have this eventually
AceJohnny2 5y ago
The `gvpr` tool in graphviz deserves more recognition. Graphviz, at its core, is a simple graph description language (DOT), which allows progressive enhancement, and a bunch of auto-layout tools where some double as renderers. The double-duty of the layout/renderers masks GraphViz's true power, which is that you can create a pipeline modifying your graph source (confusingly referred to as '.dot' files), progressively adding attributes. This is where gvpr comes in. While most are familiar with GV's all-in-one layout+rendering tools like `dot` or `neato`, gvpr is a generic Awk-like programming tool that iterates over nodes and edges. With it, you can implement any layout algorithm you like (or not!), to specify part or all of the attributes of your graph (like positioning and style), to then be rendered using `dot` to the format of your choice.
- AceJohnny2 5y ago
  I'm actually disappointed that `gvpr` isn't mentioned at all on GraphViz's main page, because I think it's its most powerful tool. All I could find are manpages, and not even on GraphViz's own website! https://manpages.debian.org/testing/graphviz/gvpr.1.en.html https://manpages.debian.org/testing/graphviz/gvpr.1.en.html
  - steveroush 5y ago
    I second the GVPR praise. Pretty powerful.
  - sterlinm 5y ago
    Are there any good examples of how you'd actually use this in practice?
    - j0057 5y ago
      I don't know of any example, but I immediately thought of a use case: to use it as a sort of CSS language where you take a graph with only 'semantic' custom attributes and use the GVPR language to transform these into shape and style attributes that are recognized by Graphviz, so that you don't have to repeat all the style information for each node and edge. That's already pretty exciting to me!
aaronax 5y ago
Graphviz was excellent for documenting my sailboat's electrical, plumbing, and data networks: https://github.com/aaronaxvig/hunter-376-docs https://github.com/aaronaxvig/hunter-376-docs Odds are slim that its future owner will have the skills to work with such a resource. But I did leave a couple printouts on the boat before leaving it!
shiryel 5y ago
I love using Graphviz to document projects, because its just a text file that I can keep with the project on git. I also used it to make a small tool to generate the relationships of Elixir's modules: https://github.com/shiryel/graphme https://github.com/shiryel/graphme
steveroush 5y ago
If you have Graphviz "how do I do..." questions, try the forum (https://forum.graphviz.org/ https://forum.graphviz.org/) or stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/ https://stackoverflow.com/). If you have bug fix or enhancement requests, try https://gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz/-/issues?scope=all&state=opened https://gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz/-/issues?scope=all&stat...
lillecarl 5y ago
FRA, the Swedish government agency for radio communications posts some riddles every year around Christmas. With one you got a couple of phone call logs and were asked questions about who was who in a terrorist group. Plotted the calls with graphviz and the questions were instantly trivial to solve. Great tool with many applications.
franga2000 5y ago
The biggest thing that makes me keep going back to graphviz despite there being nicer libraries available is that because it uses a really simple markup language instead of code or complex objects, I can juts put a handful of print/write statements into any program I want to analyse and pipe it to graphviz to give me nice graphical overview of what's going where. I've used it to visualise/debug everything from web scrapers in Python to directory scanning in Bash to proper graph algorithms in Java. Every time with no library installation or anything, just simple prints to a stream/file and perhaps a system() call at the end if I'm running it often enough.
tepitoperrito 5y ago
If you use Django, installing django-extensions[0] will add a management command to produce a "dot" file for the apps/models of your choice[1]. It's pretty handy to get a rough overview of a new project or to use in docs. [0] https://github.com/django-extensions/django-extensions https://github.com/django-extensions/django-extensions [1] https://django-extensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/graph_models.html https://django-extensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/graph_mod... Edit: typo
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zoomablemind 5y ago
Another graphing tool is Pikchr (https://pikchr.org https://pikchr.org) from the creator of SQLite; actually the SQLite doc SQL-statements diagrams were (re)done using the Pikchr. It's some kind of extension of PIC language. I'm not very proficient with graphing, so can't compare it to Graphviz, but a few examples I tried were relatively easy.
lwerdna 5y ago
I use graphviz probably weekly and it's actually become a bit of a productivity hack. If there's something I don't want to do, I can often convince myself to just DRAW it instead, usually with graphviz. Once drawn, the actual task is easier, both because the barrier of starting is overcome, and because the drawing is useful in the task. For example, I had to parse DWARF debug info recently to scrape type information, something I dreaded doing. Instead of diving into the DWARF specs, I set out to adapt one of the pyelftools [1] examples to produce a .dot file and graphed it with dot, producing [2]. Now looking at the picture, it's nearly obvious how functions and structs and types are stored. The rest is trivia (How do I access this attribute? How do I iterate over a DIE's children?). Here's a simple alias so that anything that writes to /tmp/tmp.dot can be viewed with a single command: alias graph='dot -Tpng /tmp/tmp.dot -o /tmp/tmp.png && open /tmp/tmp.png' [1] https://pypi.org/project/pyelftools/ https://pypi.org/project/pyelftools/ [2] http://tmp2.dreamhosters.com/draw-dwarf-graph.svg http://tmp2.dreamhosters.com/draw-dwarf-graph.svg
- edwinyzh 5y ago
  Wonderful, the graph is much clearer than text specs.
sdrabing 5y ago
I love Graphviz, here's a citation graph tool I build with it: https://github.com/shanedrabing/gref https://github.com/shanedrabing/gref
madphilosopher 5y ago
I use tinc VPN [0] to connect a bunch of separated LANs together, and a built-in configuration directive GraphDumpFile = /etc/tinc/network/graph.viz will generate a real-time network graph using the Graphviz DOT language. It's a cool feature that I find quite useful. [0] https://tinc-vpn.org/ https://tinc-vpn.org/
triggercut 5y ago
Graphviz has saved my bacon so many times throughout my career. Not just for visualising constraints and dependencies in planning and scheduling (construction, not computing) but in so many other areas. Best example was for fabrication of a large subsea structure. Often, these critical assets have material traceability requirements on-par with space exploration, producing thousands of pages of certificates and documentation along the way. I.e. you need to prove and assure the provenance of every piece of material sitting on the 1km down on the ocean floor back to the assay report of the soup in the ladle at the forge when it was formed, and everything in between; material certificates, design specs, third party testing, mother plate to material stock to final cut part identification, and all the third-party witnessing and assurance along the way. Easy for small parts but cumbersome for 60tn structures with thousands of parts and welds. When the requirement is 100% QA/QC coverage, linking IDs to certificates and other documents in each part of the chain meant we could easily visualise things and look for rogue elements like child parts pertaining to be from two seperate mother plates, or destructive testing coverage for all materials. Not how it's usually done but it was a useful tool for communicating to other not so technical stakeholders and helping some on the project sleep easier. :-)
danielodievich 5y ago
I love graphviz!!! Used it as a helper in my first project at Snowflake (role hierarchy layout) https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/sfgrantreport https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/sfgrantreport and won a nice hacking award for it. Then the product saw it and folded what I made into the main UI. Huge props to the graphviz for making it easy to draw my ideas from whiteboard into svg/pdf/png!
elfchief 5y ago
Related, does anyone know if there are any good tools for learning things about a graph (not necessarily a graphviz graph, but that'd be fine!)? Things like... take a graph from me and identify all the "islands" that don't connect to each other? Or to find the shortest 'path' from point A to point B in a graph?
jodrellblank 5y ago
Related: GraphVizio[1] "an addin for Microsoft Visio which allows you to layout Visio diagrams using the renowned Graphviz algorithms developed by AT&T research laboratories." - https://www.calvert.ch/graphvizio/ https://www.calvert.ch/graphvizio/ PSGraph[2] a PowerShell wrapper / DSL for GraphViz and dot language. - https://powershellexplained.com/2017-01-30-Powershell-PSGraph/ https://powershellexplained.com/2017-01-30-Powershell-PSGrap...
pezo1919 5y ago
Both VSCode and IntelliJ have PlantUML plugins which can handle DOT code and render it in the IDE. Nice to have. (VSCode's is way smoother though.)

389 points by davesailer 5y ago

tandav 5y ago

btw python wrapper is awesome: https://graphviz.readthedocs.io https://graphviz.readthedocs.io

erwincoumans 5y ago
Look nice a simple! Minor nit: I wish they could have added an option to statically link graphviz/dot, so the pip install became fully self contained.

graderjs 5y ago

I used Graphviz years ago to generate diagrams for NLP structures, and other visualizations. It was the only thing that could do what I needed. I ended up moving to Processing/P5 to create "spring physics" interactive graphs, then wrote my own eigenvector embedding visualization that could project into 3D space and had a moveable camera so you could fly around with WASD and mouse. Cool stuff! Graph visualization and 3d graphics was a fun rabbit hole

happylion0801 5y ago
Do you happen to have any open source code for this that I could look at. I am looking to do some interactive graph viz and would love to see if there is something I could reference
- graderjs 5y ago
  Sure. Let me look it up. It should be all here, at my OpenProcessing (at least all the code I wrote for myself personally): https://openprocessing.org/user/15252?view=sketches https://openprocessing.org/user/15252?view=sketches Basically any sketch that has "3d" or "aspekt" in the title is on that track. But you can also see from the thumbnail many of them are 3d world related. The navigation of that site is pretty tricky...but you can find the source code by: - Click on a sketch - Click on the 'abacus' control menu to the right - Click on the files tab in that Source code in Java should be available there. Please remember it requires a version of Processing in Java to work. I worked on this in 2011/2012 so you may need to figure out which Processing version that is. Also, here's a youtube video of flying around one of my sketches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNshrYO7Kf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNshrYO7Kf4 and here are some more videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw-6wNeif6-l7oqippdORcw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw-6wNeif6-l7oqippdORcw
  - happylion0801 5y ago
    Thank you, those look really nice, appreciate the links :). I have used processing before so atleast some of it should be familiar.

TruffleLabs 5y ago

I used this to generate relationship diagrams between companies, adding in projects and who is working on what; the final image was a map of an ecosystem of that set of businesses.

nyellin 5y ago

Here are some cool things I've done recently with graphviz: 1. Draw "sketch" style graphs using https://sketchviz.com/new https://sketchviz.com/new 2. Draw graphs of memory usage in golang programs (using pprof): https://graphviz.org/Gallery/directed/pprof.html https://graphviz.org/Gallery/directed/pprof.html 3. Embed graphviz into Sphinx docs (shameless self-promotion: https://docs.robusta.dev/master/catalog/triggers/index.html#trigger-hierarchy https://docs.robusta.dev/master/catalog/triggers/index.html#...)

taubek 5y ago
I like the output of Sketchviz. Do yo know if it is possible do make such output directly from desktop app?
- nyellin 5y ago
  Sadly I haven't found a way. Let me know if you do
  - taubek 5y ago
    Will do.
- fsiefken 5y ago
  you can install it locally with docker https://github.com/iamacarpet/sketchviz-docker https://github.com/iamacarpet/sketchviz-docker
  - taubek 5y ago
    Thanks! Docker makes my computer so slow... And it would probably be an over kill for me. But it is nice to know that it exists.
- chuchana 5y ago
  Haven't tried it yet, but this looks pretty spot on: https://github.com/gpotter2/sketchviz https://github.com/gpotter2/sketchviz

enter-haken 5y ago

I use graphviz to get a quick postgresql schema overview (good for small to medium databases) https://github.com/enter-haken/schema https://github.com/enter-haken/schema

kh1 5y ago
That looks really cool. Would you possibly share the script?
- enter-haken 5y ago
  It's part of the repo. https://github.com/enter-haken/schema/blob/master/schema.sh https://github.com/enter-haken/schema/blob/master/schema.sh It's a mixture of sed, awk and sql.
  - kh1 5y ago
    Oh I did take a quick look at the repo but didn't notice it was in the SQL. Thank you!
magicpointer 5y ago
In a similar vein there is Schemaspy[1]. It generates a static documentation website for your DB, which also uses GraphViz to build ER diagrams. [1] https://github.com/schemaspy/schemaspy https://github.com/schemaspy/schemaspy
ccakes 5y ago
Autogenerated database documentation is often pretty hit and miss but tbls[1] does a pretty good job in that space. Especially when you comment on your tables, fields, views, functions etc (which is a good habit anyway!) the output is quite useful [1] https://github.com/k1LoW/tbls https://github.com/k1LoW/tbls

bhaak 5y ago

The history and majors relationships between NetHack and its forks are visualized with graphviz. https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Variant https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Variant

ngcc_hk 5y ago

Javascript and html version needed.

kjhughes 5y ago
- Dagre (deprecated, unfortunately): https://github.com/dagrejs https://github.com/dagrejs - Viz.js (via Emscripten): https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js https://github.com/mdaines/viz.js; Online demo: http://viz-js.com/ http://viz-js.com/
- dylanowen 5y ago
  Viz.js had some hard coded memory limits last time I checked. You can work around them on load, but it's annoying. Edit: GraphQL Voyager has the memory increase hack https://github.com/APIs-guru/graphql-voyager/blob/54a178142ae8554c41c92e785ea8886f18927017/src/utils/index.ts#L21 https://github.com/APIs-guru/graphql-voyager/blob/54a178142a...
- AtNightWeCode 5y ago
  I think dagre was ok but oversold the quality of the algos it used a bit. In many cases it can be better to use a SVG file generated from Graphviz directly instead.
- tunesmith 5y ago
  An alternative to dagre-d3 is d3-dag: https://github.com/erikbrinkman/d3-dag https://github.com/erikbrinkman/d3-dag I've had good success with cytoscapejs as well, integrating with react so the graph will animate layout on transition. I use elk, which is apparently superior to sugiyama (the algorithm graphviz uses for force-directed dag layouts).
dylanowen 5y ago
https://github.com/hpcc-systems/hpcc-js-wasm https://github.com/hpcc-systems/hpcc-js-wasm was pretty easy to integrate into my last project
- RBerenguel 5y ago

dzyanis 5y ago

I used it for visualization on my project https://github.com/srce/roadmap/blob/master/stacks/java/data/roadmap.svg https://github.com/srce/roadmap/blob/master/stacks/java/data... .XML -> Python script -> .DOT -> Graphviz -> *.SVG It's very useful and probably the best example of using DOT language, unfortunately.

pydry 5y ago

Anybody know what the best visual editor is? Web or desktop.

skewbone 5y ago
Graphviz ships with a tool called dotty that can be used for visual graph editing. It's a bit cumbersome but does work. https://www.graphviz.org/pdf/dottyguide.pdf https://www.graphviz.org/pdf/dottyguide.pdf Edit: I don't know of a really good visual tool as I've found text editing .dot files directly with a live visualization pretty nice. I use graphviz pretty regularly.

dylanowen 5y ago

Graphviz is one of my favorite tools. I use it for most of my diagraming https://github.com/dylanowen/mdbook-graphviz https://github.com/dylanowen/mdbook-graphviz and I use it as debugging output when I'm working through graph problems.

Thiez 5y ago
Likewise! I have used it to easily visualize dependency graphs at multiple employers. The pictures can get a bit messy when they're very large, but they were amazing for detecting incorrect/missing dependencies.

erwincoumans 5y ago

I love the Doxygen dependency graphs, using dot/Graphviz. Wow, 1999, 23 years old, like the first Matrix movie...

AtNightWeCode 5y ago

A true classic! Powerful, yet very easy to learn.

mdtrooper 5y ago

Graphviz is another "heart bleed" / "log4j" / ... Because a lot of big companies use it (and they spend 0 €/$/... in the project), and it is broken from several years...

lloydatkinson 5y ago
Broken how?
_joel 5y ago
I'm failing to see a vector here?
graphviz 5y ago
Author(s) here We do voluntarily act on CERT advisories. But, true.

motohagiography 5y ago

Graphviz is an amazing tool, it has just suffered from being cloistered to technologists whose jobs aren't to solve the kinds of problems it is specifically adapted for. I use graphs in security and privacy quite a bit, and even built the tech for a hopeful security platform using a graph back end. They yield the fastest path through complex problems, and I use them to do in a couple of hours what typically would take client staff months. They're really compelling but oddly unpopular. Imo, they're useful for one-off pattern discovery, and they're most valuable for finding single or a few exceptions and outliers in normalized data, and you need to be in an environment where there are asymmetric returns on finding those. Surveillance seems to be their default use case, with open ended scientific research a close second. This comes up with graph based recommendation engines, which are essentially a surveillance/marketing product based on preferences. Most businesses aren't based on discovery of anything other than customers for a transaction they already have. These aren't problems engineers typically solve, which are more about scaling and optimizing, they're more marketing and sales problems, where you're looking for exceptions and opportunities. (security and privacy are the complementary antithesis of these) A graph based product (imo) is ideal for product marketing analysts optimizing for customer preferences and discovery. From a product perspective, graphs are analogous to ML, where you'd use a clustering algorithm on loosely structured data to yield categories, comparisons, and implied relationships, whereas a graph yields the same thing over the structured normalized data you can feed into it once you have imagined an ontology to fit it.

lizen_one 5y ago
That sounds really interesting! Can you give a few more details how you use Graphviz? How does it give such a great advantage "to do in a couple of hours what typically would take client staff months." Did I understand it correctly that you use it to discover patterns? Are these patterns discovered by just using the layout engines? Arent' other tools, e.g. networkx in Python or cytoscape in javascript easier to use interactively in a REPL? What is the typical workflow (maybe plot, find interesting pattern, change query/data in a loop)? I'm really interested in how Graphviz can be so great. I am currently working with the other mentioned tools for visualization purposes.

janto 5y ago

https://plantuml.com https://plantuml.com graphs look much better

rwoerz 5y ago
PlantUML depends on GraphViz (https://plantuml.com/en/graphviz-dot https://plantuml.com/en/graphviz-dot)
- janto 5y ago
  For some of its diagrams, yes. And yet PlantUML results still look better. I think the problem is that Graphviz's glyphs are somewhat crude.

dddddaviddddd 5y ago

Graphviz made it really easy for me to plot dependencies in Go data structures! After I put together a lexer, Graphviz took care of all the difficult work of making sense of the data: https://github.com/davidschlachter/embedded-struct-visualizer https://github.com/davidschlachter/embedded-struct-visualize...

jonstewart 5y ago

My team uses a succinct graphviz dot file to note the dependencies between different git repositories. This is then used by the build system to figure out what needs to be rebuilt. There are lots of other ways to skin this cat, this is just the method we chose, and it's oddly pleasing.

paphillips 5y ago

I've used GraphViz a number of times and highly recommend it as a standard tool on your belt. Having a stand-alone executable that can export to SVG is great. The most complex thing I've done with it [1]: a tool (MIT-license) that builds diagrams of the data and addressing pipeline for a DSP processor, and lets one 'scrub through' the assembler code frame by frame and see the values propagate through the blocks. Also PlantUML [2] uses it for most diagrams. Getting layout and positioning the way you want can be tricky but is usually achievable with patience and hidden objects. [1] https://github.com/paphillips/DFB https://github.com/paphillips/DFB [2] https://plantuml.com/graphviz-dot https://plantuml.com/graphviz-dot

thrwawy283 5y ago
My graphviz-fu got so much better when I started using invisible objects for the grid-like layouts. At that point you're just using graphviz for positioning/spacing/styling instead of creating the overall topology.
- buzzwordninja 5y ago
  This sounds interesting, can you expand on that a bit please?
  - thrwawy283 5y ago
    You're handing graphviz a list of relationships. Sometimes you know the ideal way to visualize this is a tree, or something with right angles, but graphviz isn't laying it out that neatly. So you create extra nodes, and edges to those nodes, so that graphviz considers it a "balanced" tree or grid. Then you use styling to turn those nodes invisible (showing just the nodes/edges you want). Once I have this correct I usually contain it within a "cluster", and then link that cluster to the larger diagram.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    if you want X nodes falling near in the graph you just put them into a box with white lines and they move as one from this point. Can be made with the cluster environment.

nsajko 5y ago

A fast interactive 3D alternative for visualizing large graphs is Graphia: https://github.com/graphia-app/graphia https://github.com/graphia-app/graphia https://graphia.app https://graphia.app However, it's currently suffering from the Qt switch from 5 to 6. Regarding Graphviz itself, I wonder why is there no special layout logic for planar graphs? They can be recognized and embedded on the plane in linear time without intersecting edges, so it would be very nice if some of the Graphviz tools actually did that. A recent set of minimal graph coloring Graphviz visualizations of mine: https://gitlab.com/nsajko/example_optimally_colored_graphs https://gitlab.com/nsajko/example_optimally_colored_graphs

_joel 5y ago

It's great to see it still going. Used it for Puppet as well as dpkg output (we made a full dependency list of our multimedia ingest application, i.e. lots of custom ffmpeg and libboost etc). That thing was huge

indentit 5y ago

I've never been that happy with the output from any of the different graphviz engines. I'd like to see a UI graph editing tool which can import and export .dot format, but also allows manually moving nodes (which I guess wouldn't get exported unless arbitrary metadata is supported), and ofc exports to svg. Maybe there's already something similar I haven't stumbled across yet? I guess my use case is mainly swimlanes and places where nodes don't have to have the same rank.

nyellin 5y ago
Totally agree with this. I always want to start with graphviz but then modify the output afterwards to fix the layout
- taeric 5y ago
  I mentioned this in another thread. You can have the output be a dot file. Which you can then edit and send back with a flag to not redo the layout.
  - nyellin 5y ago
    That's a wonderful tip, thank you!
    - taeric 5y ago
      Hope it helps! There used to be a program called dotty, looks like it was basically abandoned, though. :(
      - bakul 5y ago
        it’s there in the graphviz github repo.
        taeric 5y ago
        But it is only x11, right? Not sure how well it is supported on the platforms you can run it on. And I don't have x on my work computer.

phkahler 5y ago

Always wanted a way to (have GCC?) send a call graph to graphviz. A reduced version indicating calls across files would also be useful. I get that polymorphism can mess that up, so maybe just link callers to the base class in those cases.

leni536 5y ago
I remember being able to set that up with clang (obviously not indirect calls).

tonerow 5y ago

Way fewer features but probably easier to use ~> https://flowchart.fun https://flowchart.fun Exports to SVG, PNG, JPG

pc86 5y ago
This looks cool and like a novel way to generate the graphs, I'll have to take a look

ncc-erik 5y ago

I maintain an open-source project [1] that uses graphs to model data. I wanted to make my project as accessible as possible, so Graphviz was perfect since it's dead-simple to install and use on all major OS platforms. [1] https://github.com/nccgroup/PMapper https://github.com/nccgroup/PMapper

karlicoss 5y ago

Graphviz is awesome! Here are a couple of my diagrams: https://beepb00p.xyz/blog-graph.html https://beepb00p.xyz/blog-graph.html -- graph of my blog pages with tags/connections between posts, generated with a DSL-ish python script https://github.com/karlicoss/beepb00p/blob/master/misc/index.py https://github.com/karlicoss/beepb00p/blob/master/misc/index... https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html -- map of my personal data & infrastructure (discussed a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26269832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26269832 ). Also a similar DSL https://github.com/karlicoss/myinfra/blob/master/generate.py https://github.com/karlicoss/myinfra/blob/master/generate.py The main downside for me is that sometimes it gets the positioning wrong, and you can see how it can be easily fixed, but it's hard to convince graphviz to actually do so. Basically I'd love a tool where I can do 10% of positioning manually and let the rest be constraint based like in graphviz.

taeric 5y ago
It used to have a built in tool to move nodes it has placed. All I can find scanning the docs right now is the -n flag to neato, which will honor existing pos fields. Edit: dotty is what I was trying to remember.

justsomehnguy 5y ago

PSGraph is a PowerShell module to dynamically generate dot files. I used it (with a various degree of success) to plot some diagrams for my personal usage. https://github.com/KevinMarquette/PSGraph https://github.com/KevinMarquette/PSGraph

soheil 5y ago

At what point does one say maybe a static svg isn't the right way to display that much complexity [0]? [0] https://graphviz.org/Gallery/twopi/twopi2.svg https://graphviz.org/Gallery/twopi/twopi2.svg

omegote 5y ago

I've used Graphviz for many years and my main gripe with it is the lack of customization. Yes, there's "some" customization, but there's a point (not too far from the initial style) where, if you don't like the output, you're out of luck and might as well redraw it using draw.io or some other WYSIWYG editor.

lmeyerov 5y ago
Graph viz is admirably powerful, even here. The main techniques seem to be invisible objects and custom code, in case that helps. The cassowary solver group in Australia (I'm blanking on the university, Monash?) goes further via custom constraint logic, and I believe iOS layouts were deeply inspired, and maybe even had one of their students. Graph technologies are tricky to build up -- you can go deep in many areas like this. Afaict, AT&T/Bell Research used to be the main developers of graphviz, and when that corporate lab thinned out, so did graph viz development. A similar story happened with gephi devs when they left their universities (was popular in social data), and cytoscape (popular in bio) is still largely at that fragile state. We are historically big contributors to OSS at Graphistry, but saw the history of funding issues in this space, and how each tool reached a frustratingly low ceiling due to it. We decided to not start as open core, and instead made a free GPU tier + release individual pieces as OSS (Apache Arrow's JS tier, etc) + initially charge for GPU code, until we could build + grow more commercially targeted parts. Thankfully, we are getting to the point of enough sustainable revenue that we are pushing much more to our OSS libs now, and one of our OSS pushes for 2022 will be moving custom (GPU-accelerated) traditional layouts & AI layouts to the OSS lib pygraphistry :) A request we get often get for pygraphistry and our file uploader UI is dotfile (and graphml/gexf) conversion/ingest for then viewing+editing in our scalable interactive graph renderer, so we have been thinking of adding a pygraphistry example just to demonstrate the OSS flow!

ggerganov 5y ago

For the ASCII lovers, I made this simple web page to help convert dot to text diagrams: https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com It's useful to embed diagrams directly in source code for example. Here is a sample [0]: 0.6 ┌─────────────────────────┐ ▼ │ ┌───┐ 0.8 ┌───┐ 0.1 ┌───┐ 0.7 ┌───┐ 0.2 ┌───┐ │ d │ ─────▶ │ │ ◀───── │ e │ ─────▶ │ a │ ─────▶ │ b │ └───┘ │ c │ └───┘ └───┘ └───┘ │ │ 0.4 │ │ │ ◀──────────────────────────────────┘ └───┘ And a more complex example from a project of mine [1]: ┌─────────────┐ │ @tweet2doom │ │ │ │ ROOT │ ◀─────┐ └─────────────┘ │ ▲ │ │ │ │ │ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ │ @player1 │ │ @player2 │ │ │ │ │ │ /play 50-u │ │ /play 30-l,50-f │ └─────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ ▲ ▲ │ │ │ │ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ │ @tweet2doom │ │ @tweet2doom │ │ │ │ │ │ Video │ │ Video │ │ │ │ │ │ Start: 1 │ │ Start: 1 │ │ End:50 │ │ End:80 │ └─────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ ▲ │ │ ┌─────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ │ @tweet2doom │ │ │ │ │ │ @player2 │ │ Video │ │ │ │ │ │ /play 30-l │ │ Start: 80 │ │ │ │ End:110 │ ──▶ │ │ └─────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ [0] https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com/?src_hash=476410d3 https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com/?src_hash=476410d3 [1] https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com/?src_hash=1ee7dcfe https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com/?src_hash=1ee7dcfe

cjlm 5y ago
I love this and wrote about it in my newsletter on network thinking [0] – thank you! [0] https://sourcetarget.email/editions/17/ https://sourcetarget.email/editions/17/
Godel_unicode 5y ago
If you're on mobile you're going to want to rotate your phone.

GuB-42 5y ago

One of my favorite applications of graphviz https://anidb.net/anime/715/relation/graph https://anidb.net/anime/715/relation/graph It is a great tool to have, it makes drawing complex diagrams manageable.

mLuby 5y ago

GraphViz is great, like Markdown. I recommend https://edotor.net https://edotor.net for online use: 1. No set-up, no accounts/registration. 2. Free, no ads. 3. Simple, pleasant UI with variable/keyword autocompletion and even multi-cursor find/replace! 4. Your graph is saved in the URL so sharing the link lets others play with a copy of your graph. I usually link-shorten the URLs since they're long: https://bit.ly/edotor-example-1 https://bit.ly/edotor-example-1 https://bit.ly/edotor-example-2 https://bit.ly/edotor-example-2

tokumei 5y ago

Graphviz has really helped me in the past with troubleshooting giant CMake projects with lots of dependencies.

mbostock 5y ago

I love Graphviz! It’s in the Observable standard library as the dot tagged template literal, powered by Viz.js. https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/dot https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/dot Here’s a recent example where I used it to figure out why certain dependencies are in my node_modules: https://twitter.com/mbostock/status/1479693504511053824 https://twitter.com/mbostock/status/1479693504511053824

jahewson 5y ago
Is there a fork of viz.js that’s still maintained? The original was abandoned in 2018.
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  no. two steps above the abandoned version, before the web threads attempt, works quite nicely.
  - funstuff007 5y ago
    two commits previous or two releases previous to final version?
rgovostes 5y ago
That said, compared to the visual clarity of most of the visualizations you share, the graphs that come out of Graphviz are pretty hard to read. If you zoom in and pan around you can easily get disoriented in some patch of nothing but spaghetti lines. This is definitely an area where some mbostock magic would be of huge benefit.

l0b0 5y ago

Graphviz is one of my favourite tools, but I use it very rarely. I noticed a mention of support for UTF-8 and some great documentation layout improvements, but what are the other big features that have been implemented in the last few years?

graphviz 5y ago
Most of the work has been on CI/CD, Windows, rationalizing and modernizing the code, and Zheng, Pawar and Goodman contributed a stochastic gradient descent solver, described here, https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04626 https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04626 with benefits pointed out by Börsig, Brandes and Pasztor https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.10376 https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.10376 but it's not a default solver, you'd have to ask for it. Great people joined (took over?) the project and have done an amazing job of triage on open bugs, and some were even fixed. We rewrote parts of the network simplex solver to eliminate some of the dumbfounding "trouble in init_rank" errors. We have a long wish list, and are hoping for funding to do some of this work.

dang 5y ago

Past related threads: How Graphviz thinks the USA is laid out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25611053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25611053 - Jan 2021 (80 comments) Create diagrams with code using Graphviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475225 - June 2020 (211 comments) Graphviz – Graph Visualization Software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797932 - Dec 2018 (3 comments) Show HN: Project Management as Code with Graphviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15950325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15950325 - Dec 2017 (64 comments) A Quick Introduction to Graphviz - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324883 - Sept 2017 (44 comments) A Technique for Drawing Directed Graphs (1993) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14568180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14568180 - June 2017 (11 comments) What happened to GraphViz? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11265188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11265188 - March 2016 (2 comments) Ask HN: What is your favorite application of Graphviz? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790668 - Aug 2009 (8 comments) There have been others, of course, but these seem to be the ones most focused on Graphviz itself.

technimad 5y ago

Many moons ago I created all graphs in the LPIC2 exam prep book [1] using graphviz. The book is open sourced now, and all dot files are preserved in the accompanying repo [2]. One thing I learned creating these graphs was that with some tinkering you have quite a lot of control on how the result will look, without littering the semantic in the source file with a lot of markup. I choose graphviz because the dot notation can easily be checked into source control. It is also easy to create reproducible results using a makefile. [1] https://lpic2book.github.io/src/ https://lpic2book.github.io/src/ [2] https://github.com/lpic2book/src/tree/main/docs/images https://github.com/lpic2book/src/tree/main/docs/images

thangalin 5y ago

My text editor, KeenWrite[0] renders Graphviz diagrams in near real-time. KeenWrite extends the functionality a little by allowing the use of variables inside the diagrams. In the example diagram[1], the 350 value stems from a variable and its value is shown near the top. [0]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite [1]: https://i.ibb.co/CVfsJDh/hacker-news.png https://i.ibb.co/CVfsJDh/hacker-news.png

srinathkrishna 5y ago

I've long marveled on of my ex-colleagues graphviz-fu. He'd whip out a new graphviz online doc and explain an architecture through it. Helped a ton during the pandemic as we were all remote.

graphviz 5y ago

Author(s) here. Ask us anything.

pezo1919 5y ago
May I ask about the official and unoffical(?) ways of interactivity in browser (or elsewhere)? Is there some nice goto material on that?
jodrellblank 5y ago
How come the graph edges are "--" and the digraph edges are "->", but not "<-"? That means it's not possible to flip graph/digraph to see how it looks with/without arrows, but naievely it doesn't seem that the difference makes any difference except making that difficult, if the connections must always be written left to right. (I've not used more advanced features, so it could be that it does more, or could be that it was built expecting people to know what they want first, which would all be fine)

undershirt 5y ago

Did anyone see the new pathing algorithm for connecting graph nodes that made some rounds on twitter? It looked way better than a normal force-directed graph. I can’t remember what it was exactly, and have lost the reference, but it was a side effect of solving what looked like a traffic problem.

inciampati 5y ago
Stochastic gradient descent optimization of the layout based on distances in walks in the graph?
graphviz 5y ago
Do you mean Yu, Schumacher and Crane's repulsive curves, as shown in figure 26 of https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/RepulsiveCurves/RepulsiveCurves.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/RepulsiveCurves/Rep... ?
- undershirt 5y ago
  that's it, thank you! i suppose graphviz will have this eventually

AceJohnny2 5y ago

The `gvpr` tool in graphviz deserves more recognition. Graphviz, at its core, is a simple graph description language (DOT), which allows progressive enhancement, and a bunch of auto-layout tools where some double as renderers. The double-duty of the layout/renderers masks GraphViz's true power, which is that you can create a pipeline modifying your graph source (confusingly referred to as '.dot' files), progressively adding attributes. This is where gvpr comes in. While most are familiar with GV's all-in-one layout+rendering tools like `dot` or `neato`, gvpr is a generic Awk-like programming tool that iterates over nodes and edges. With it, you can implement any layout algorithm you like (or not!), to specify part or all of the attributes of your graph (like positioning and style), to then be rendered using `dot` to the format of your choice.

AceJohnny2 5y ago
I'm actually disappointed that `gvpr` isn't mentioned at all on GraphViz's main page, because I think it's its most powerful tool. All I could find are manpages, and not even on GraphViz's own website! https://manpages.debian.org/testing/graphviz/gvpr.1.en.html https://manpages.debian.org/testing/graphviz/gvpr.1.en.html
- steveroush 5y ago
  I second the GVPR praise. Pretty powerful.
- sterlinm 5y ago
  Are there any good examples of how you'd actually use this in practice?
  - j0057 5y ago
    I don't know of any example, but I immediately thought of a use case: to use it as a sort of CSS language where you take a graph with only 'semantic' custom attributes and use the GVPR language to transform these into shape and style attributes that are recognized by Graphviz, so that you don't have to repeat all the style information for each node and edge. That's already pretty exciting to me!

aaronax 5y ago

Graphviz was excellent for documenting my sailboat's electrical, plumbing, and data networks: https://github.com/aaronaxvig/hunter-376-docs https://github.com/aaronaxvig/hunter-376-docs Odds are slim that its future owner will have the skills to work with such a resource. But I did leave a couple printouts on the boat before leaving it!

shiryel 5y ago

I love using Graphviz to document projects, because its just a text file that I can keep with the project on git. I also used it to make a small tool to generate the relationships of Elixir's modules: https://github.com/shiryel/graphme https://github.com/shiryel/graphme

steveroush 5y ago

If you have Graphviz "how do I do..." questions, try the forum (https://forum.graphviz.org/ https://forum.graphviz.org/) or stackoverflow (https://stackoverflow.com/ https://stackoverflow.com/). If you have bug fix or enhancement requests, try https://gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz/-/issues?scope=all&state=opened https://gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz/-/issues?scope=all&stat...

lillecarl 5y ago

FRA, the Swedish government agency for radio communications posts some riddles every year around Christmas. With one you got a couple of phone call logs and were asked questions about who was who in a terrorist group. Plotted the calls with graphviz and the questions were instantly trivial to solve. Great tool with many applications.

franga2000 5y ago

The biggest thing that makes me keep going back to graphviz despite there being nicer libraries available is that because it uses a really simple markup language instead of code or complex objects, I can juts put a handful of print/write statements into any program I want to analyse and pipe it to graphviz to give me nice graphical overview of what's going where. I've used it to visualise/debug everything from web scrapers in Python to directory scanning in Bash to proper graph algorithms in Java. Every time with no library installation or anything, just simple prints to a stream/file and perhaps a system() call at the end if I'm running it often enough.

tepitoperrito 5y ago

If you use Django, installing django-extensions[0] will add a management command to produce a "dot" file for the apps/models of your choice[1]. It's pretty handy to get a rough overview of a new project or to use in docs. [0] https://github.com/django-extensions/django-extensions https://github.com/django-extensions/django-extensions [1] https://django-extensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/graph_models.html https://django-extensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/graph_mod... Edit: typo

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

zoomablemind 5y ago

Another graphing tool is Pikchr (https://pikchr.org https://pikchr.org) from the creator of SQLite; actually the SQLite doc SQL-statements diagrams were (re)done using the Pikchr. It's some kind of extension of PIC language. I'm not very proficient with graphing, so can't compare it to Graphviz, but a few examples I tried were relatively easy.

lwerdna 5y ago

I use graphviz probably weekly and it's actually become a bit of a productivity hack. If there's something I don't want to do, I can often convince myself to just DRAW it instead, usually with graphviz. Once drawn, the actual task is easier, both because the barrier of starting is overcome, and because the drawing is useful in the task. For example, I had to parse DWARF debug info recently to scrape type information, something I dreaded doing. Instead of diving into the DWARF specs, I set out to adapt one of the pyelftools [1] examples to produce a .dot file and graphed it with dot, producing [2]. Now looking at the picture, it's nearly obvious how functions and structs and types are stored. The rest is trivia (How do I access this attribute? How do I iterate over a DIE's children?). Here's a simple alias so that anything that writes to /tmp/tmp.dot can be viewed with a single command: alias graph='dot -Tpng /tmp/tmp.dot -o /tmp/tmp.png && open /tmp/tmp.png' [1] https://pypi.org/project/pyelftools/ https://pypi.org/project/pyelftools/ [2] http://tmp2.dreamhosters.com/draw-dwarf-graph.svg http://tmp2.dreamhosters.com/draw-dwarf-graph.svg

edwinyzh 5y ago
Wonderful, the graph is much clearer than text specs.

sdrabing 5y ago

I love Graphviz, here's a citation graph tool I build with it: https://github.com/shanedrabing/gref https://github.com/shanedrabing/gref

madphilosopher 5y ago

I use tinc VPN [0] to connect a bunch of separated LANs together, and a built-in configuration directive GraphDumpFile = /etc/tinc/network/graph.viz will generate a real-time network graph using the Graphviz DOT language. It's a cool feature that I find quite useful. [0] https://tinc-vpn.org/ https://tinc-vpn.org/

triggercut 5y ago

Graphviz has saved my bacon so many times throughout my career. Not just for visualising constraints and dependencies in planning and scheduling (construction, not computing) but in so many other areas. Best example was for fabrication of a large subsea structure. Often, these critical assets have material traceability requirements on-par with space exploration, producing thousands of pages of certificates and documentation along the way. I.e. you need to prove and assure the provenance of every piece of material sitting on the 1km down on the ocean floor back to the assay report of the soup in the ladle at the forge when it was formed, and everything in between; material certificates, design specs, third party testing, mother plate to material stock to final cut part identification, and all the third-party witnessing and assurance along the way. Easy for small parts but cumbersome for 60tn structures with thousands of parts and welds. When the requirement is 100% QA/QC coverage, linking IDs to certificates and other documents in each part of the chain meant we could easily visualise things and look for rogue elements like child parts pertaining to be from two seperate mother plates, or destructive testing coverage for all materials. Not how it's usually done but it was a useful tool for communicating to other not so technical stakeholders and helping some on the project sleep easier. :-)

danielodievich 5y ago

I love graphviz!!! Used it as a helper in my first project at Snowflake (role hierarchy layout) https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/sfgrantreport https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/sfgrantreport and won a nice hacking award for it. Then the product saw it and folded what I made into the main UI. Huge props to the graphviz for making it easy to draw my ideas from whiteboard into svg/pdf/png!

elfchief 5y ago

Related, does anyone know if there are any good tools for learning things about a graph (not necessarily a graphviz graph, but that'd be fine!)? Things like... take a graph from me and identify all the "islands" that don't connect to each other? Or to find the shortest 'path' from point A to point B in a graph?

jodrellblank 5y ago

Related: GraphVizio[1] "an addin for Microsoft Visio which allows you to layout Visio diagrams using the renowned Graphviz algorithms developed by AT&T research laboratories." - https://www.calvert.ch/graphvizio/ https://www.calvert.ch/graphvizio/ PSGraph[2] a PowerShell wrapper / DSL for GraphViz and dot language. - https://powershellexplained.com/2017-01-30-Powershell-PSGraph/ https://powershellexplained.com/2017-01-30-Powershell-PSGrap...

pezo1919 5y ago

Both VSCode and IntelliJ have PlantUML plugins which can handle DOT code and render it in the IDE. Nice to have. (VSCode's is way smoother though.)