9 ms·

Graphviz 7

205 points by nikolay 4y ago

phoronixrly 4y ago
Changelog: https://gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz/-/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md https://gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz/-/blob/main/CHANGELOG.m...
- ognyankulev 4y ago
  No idea why v7 is trending now. The big changes (moving to C99) are in v3 from 2022-02-26.
  - topaz0 4y ago
    That's a lot of major versions in just a few months!
    - shaftway 4y ago
      Looks like they consider any breaking change a major rev bump. And it looks like most releases since then have had at least one breaking change.
jokoon 4y ago
I used graphviz to process the output of clang format, to visualize function calls between functions. The output was quite messy. I don't really know for to give clues to it, I tried several options.
_flux 4y ago
Great tool and nice to see such active development on it! From 3.0.0 to 7.0.0 just during this year, though.. ? I guess very few are depending on the library interfaces which I imagine are being broken, or do the major version increments just signify nothing of importance?-)
- Bootvis 4y ago
  It seems to me that they bumped the major version for every breaking change in the changelog. I guess that is in strict compliance with semantic versioning but indeed it looks strange.
  - NetOpWibby 4y ago
    Wild, seeing SemVer actually used properly.
    - Arainach 4y ago
      You don't need to do a new release for every checkin. You can make a series of breaking changes and only then declare a new release, bumping the version number. After all, it took (at least) 21 years to get from 0 to 3.0.0 There's absolutely no reason for 2 major bumps 11 days apart.
      - egwor 4y ago
        If you’re doing CI/CD, though, you should expect this kind of thing. I do appreciate that maybe there could be a throttle for major bumps.
        Arainach 4y ago
        If you're doing CI/CD and pulling from head rather than official published versions, you deserve what you get. If you mean the graphviz project itself, version numbers are meaningless to it internally.
      - The_Colonel 4y ago
        > You can make a series of breaking changes and only then declare a new release That means you need to postpone the breaking changes for a while, kind of bunching them together. Many projects do that, but it also incurs some cost. > After all, it took (at least) 21 years to get from 0 to 3.0.0 It's possible that they did not implement semantic changes in the strict sense before and included small breaking changes into non-major releases (I think a lot of software does this). Fast changes of version numbers may just mean they started reflecting each small BC break into the version number.
currycurry16 4y ago
One of the better graph visualization tools! Which tool do you people use most often for graph visualization? I kind of linger between networkx, Gephi, graphviz and d3.
- specproc 4y ago
  I really struggle with this. I also use networkx, Gephi, and graphviz, and occasionally plotly. D3 is too much of a learning overhead for me at the moment. I'm really in the market for a decent engine that's both easy to use and enables high quality interactive exploration of massive datasets. Plotly comes close, but struggles with larger datasets and is still a bit fiddly. I'd love to be able to lob a large structure into a UI and share with colleagues, and they'd be able to visualise and filter based on node/edge metadata, time series etc. Something like Gephi, but web-based and considerably easier to use.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jcims 4y ago
    Agree. Neo4j’s visualization tools are surprisingly painful to use. I’d love to find something that allowed you to trivially add code to the layout engine. Graphviz’s clustering capability seems to be unique among any of the tools I’ve used as well.
    - specproc 4y ago
      Gephi can cluster, but the algorithm isn't that transparent or flexible. I've increasingly found myself doing the clustering in Python and rendering in Gephi.
  - lmeyerov 4y ago
    That's why we built Graphistry :) Can be used code-free (drop in a csv or log file) or via analysis workflows like from Jupyter notebooks and internal dashboards. We are roughly parity for Gephi's features, and pushing (far) ahead on web, GPU, perf, ai, automation, etc. Always curious about gaps - our Slack is a good place to chat on that.
m_eiman 4y ago
From the readme: "This project has only 3 of its founders remaining as volunteer maintainers, and support is limited and may end soon. If you can help fund to a more formal foundation to continue this project, please contact north on graphviz org."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- graphviz 4y ago
  You can ask us anything here. The community should applaud the efforts of Magnus Jacobsson, Mark Hansen, Matthew Fernandez, Steve Roush, and recently Costa Shulyupin to support graphviz in a more disciplined and professional way. In hindsight, we got a lot of play by treating Graphviz as a research vehicle, but we weren't able to (or didn't choose to) direct a lot of effort into documentation, rewriting existing code, sorting out feature interaction, developing very polished front ends, or broadening the scope of the effort. Or finding a new home after AT&T Labs lost its enthusiasm.
- Karliss 4y ago
  I am glad to see that they recently (relative to project age) got two new developers which have for the last two years actively worked on rejuvenating the project, tackling some long standing issues, and actually making new releases with bugfixes. That message was added to README before that. Of course it doesn't mean people should stop supporting the project, but I am currently less worried about future of graphviz than the last time I looked into the state of it.
rcarmo 4y ago
I liked GraphViz a lot, but eventually got frustrated with its layout algorithms and default look and feel. I would switch to Mermaid wholesale if it could render SVGs without requiring a browser engine.
- comfypotato 4y ago
  I’ve personally settled on grapviz (a derivative actually, plantuml) being “good enough” for casual diagrams. Plantuml is built with the idea that it’s for quick and dirty communication, and I think graphviz translates well to this. It’s a nice way to put together a sequence diagram that just helps you understand control flow (and then never took at it again). I have to admit, I haven’t found a more formal programmatic tool. Ultimately I have to turn to “by hand” tools if I want something more complicated. If you can’t translate that last statement, it means I just never do anything more complicated.
  - xamde 4y ago
    The next step are tools like featdoc which let you define systems and interaction rules which then generate a (mermaid) sequence diagram. Example at https://dev.azure.com/itmv/Coffee%20Shop/_wiki/wikis/Coffee-Shop.wiki/5/Lunch-Customer-(in-a-hurry) https://dev.azure.com/itmv/Coffee%20Shop/_wiki/wikis/Coffee-... Project at https://github.com/Calpano/featdoc https://github.com/Calpano/featdoc Disclosure: I maintain this project
  - fsiefken 4y ago
    For mermaid, would pairing it with selenium and/or a headless browser be an option?
    - rcarmo 4y ago
      Heck no. Why can't it generate the SVG without a browser?
    - comfypotato 4y ago
      Not sure if this question is directed at me. My understanding is that mermaid is relatively similar to plantuml in that it doesn't give you 100% control over layout and diagram features. What plantuml lacks (maybe mermaid less so) could really only be improved upon by working with raw svg I think. There is a LaTex package tikz that offer much more flexibility than plantuml/mermaid, but you still run into limitations in that diagram features are predefined.
hardware2win 4y ago
Really handy tool Probably saved me a ton of time that I would spend on implementing visualization myself
- jhsinger27 4y ago
  same here
Torlan 4y ago
I made a DOT language module for BBEdit if anyone is interested https://github.com/VadimMuhtarov/DOT-BBEdit-CLM https://github.com/VadimMuhtarov/DOT-BBEdit-CLM
rad_gruchalski 4y ago
Someone needs to make a multi-OS clone of omniGraffle. I paid €179 for omniGraffle, I’d pay for a multi-OS alternative.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Does omniGraffle accept text input? Because one of the points of GraphViz is text input, which can be easily source-controlled, diffed, machine-generated, etc.
  - leejoramo 4y ago
    Yes Omnigraffle accepted Graphviz files. But uses its own excellent layout engine and allows you to adjust the layout by hand. If you include integration with OmniOutliner, you also get Graffle can also use a wide variety of text based outline file formats. https://support.omnigroup.com/doc-assets//OmniGraffle-Mac/OmniGraffle-Mac-v7.0.0.1/en/EPUB/xhtml/0301_import.xhtml https://support.omnigroup.com/doc-assets//OmniGraffle-Mac/Om...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - taeric 4y ago
      Amusingly, graphviz had dotty way back in the day so that you could adjust by hand. Now, it looks like they have gvedit. I haven't tried that one. That said, the ability to "fix" the location of some items by providing it in the dot file is a feature most folks seem to ignore. Or not know exists.
- egwor 4y ago
  I objected to how often I had to upgrade the version and pay for very minor fixes.
  - Arcanum-XIII 4y ago
    I bought it 5 years ago and haven't given them a dime since, and got a lot of new feature since (scripting!). I'd love to have more library, but that's another issue :)
david_p 4y ago
This is more for diagramming small graphs. If you are trying to render large networks, there are better alternatives. For OSS graph visualization libraries, check out: - Sigma.js - Vis.js For commercial options: - Ogma (disclosure: my company builds that one) - KeyLines
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago
  You can’t mention commercial options without mentioning yWorks. Their product is absolutely amazing and I’d use it for everything if it wasn’t for the steep cost.
  - ygra 4y ago
    As someone working at yWorks on yFiles, thanks for the kind words :-) Having used Graphviz extensively over the years as well, the cost of yFiles is certainly unfortunate, but I guess we simply serve a different markt segment than Graphviz or D3. (On a somewhat related note: Our online graph editor, yEd Live, support parsing a subset of Graphviz' syntax and that enables running at least some yFiles layout algorithms on Graphviz graphs. No export back, though.)
  - lmeyerov 4y ago
    (Big fan of graphviz, it was such a shame when AT&T pulled funding!) Maybe helpful, more for visual graph data analysis than say arch diagramming: we build Graphistry specifically for interactively analyzing more data than these tools, eg, GPU client + GPU server, and being more batteries-included. The free Graphistry Hub site is similar to diagrams.net and GitHub for folks who aren't self-hosting GPUs. We are still working towards OSS'ing the core renderer, but all our new graph neural networks + graph compute + graph layout layers are all already OSS-first (see PyGraphistry), and we are part of the apache arrow + rapids communities. If your kind of thing, we are very much hiring :)
- einpoklum 4y ago
  Are Sigma and Vis widely-usable (i.e. have C bindings), or only for browsers/JS enginers?
- 4y ago
samsquire 4y ago
I use Graphviz dot syntax to configure entire cloud computing environments in the order they must be built. This is pipelines as code and infrastructure as code It's very powerful! Not every organisation can bring up an entire environment with one command of documentation their infrastructure with Graphviz. Here is a executable diagram of a build worker cloud nodes, Kubernetes, consul, vault, Debian package server, Java app, SSH bastion, Prometheus, grafana, DNS and security groups. https://github.com/samsquire/mazzle/blob/master/docs/architecture.png https://github.com/samsquire/mazzle/blob/master/docs/archite... The tool also parallelises the build based on the graph so for example packer builds can run in parallel. https://devops-pipeline.com/ https://devops-pipeline.com/ It also has a GUI but as a tool it's not ready for other people to use.
- fsiefken 4y ago
  o wow! i know that graphana can be used with mermaid diagrams, but this is a whole new (lower) level. it would be nice if the graphviz could be styled a bit nices (like with sketchviz), but that's icing on the cake.
- jeffparsons 4y ago
  Holy macaroni, this is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. I wonder if a top-level post of this could generate some interesting discussions about other people's exotic approaches to "DevOps", too?
  - samsquire 4y ago
    Unfortunately I tried promoting my things too much so most of my submissions are blocked by the self promotion filter. Yes I would love to hear other people's solutions to DevOps problems. I find it an interesting space. There's lots of good ideas but they haven't been brought together.
- DanielBMarkham 4y ago
  Very cool. I created an analysis compiler that takes intent information and makes it part of the Enterprise DevSecOps pipeline in order to share realtime analysis with the entire organization. As I continued that work, I've also started talking about the feasibility of creating a supercompiler. GraphViz is the shit, man. It was exactly what I needed to work on this material. You can create your own notation and then couple it with all kinds of tech by way of batch. Highly recommended.* *The hardest part, frankly, was unlearning all of the other diagramming paradigms I've used. YMMV, but I found GraphViz most useful when you're going completely greenfield.
nu11ptr 4y ago
I love GraphViz. Many are saying the layout isn't that great and there are better options, etc. etc. and I have no doubt that for some use cases, that might be true. However, GraphViz "just works" for me. Every time I build a tree-like structure, I simply open up a new .gv file and just start typing nodes connected with an arrow ("->"). I can do this without taking ANY extra time - I just type it in as I'm developing the structure. When I'm done, I have a very nice diagram. For the more complex ones I add some color or other small details, but often they are simple black and white unidirectional graphs. I keep them open while I work and they help me visually see my structures which helps me see the problem domain more accurately and write better code.
- denysvitali 4y ago
  Shouldn't the extension be .dot?
  - TYMorningCoffee 4y ago
    .gz is already used by gzip[1]. This wiki[2] says it is .gv . I've always used .dot so I don't know what to use anymore. edit: according to this[3] discussion , Microsoft uses .dot. I then found this wiki[4] page that supports the claim. dot is used by Microsoft Word document template files. I will switch to .gv [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_languag... [3] https://forum.graphviz.org/t/what-is-the-file-extension-for-dot-file/35 https://forum.graphviz.org/t/what-is-the-file-extension-for-... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_filename_extensions_(A%E2%80%93E) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_filename_extensions_(A... [4]
    - ctenb 4y ago
      I've used .dot in the past and stumbled upon issues with git related tools (I believe git diff) interpreting the .dot file as a word related file. I'm using .gv now.
ropeladder 4y ago
Does anyone know of any DOT -> mermaidjs format converters? I was looking for one recently and was surprised not to find anything more robust than someone's quick search and replace script.
- graphviz 4y ago
  Does anyone want to look at porting the mermaid layout method back to Graphviz? It might be useful to people. I guess some friction would be around the kind of awkward way that Graphviz has to deal with objects that aren't strictly nodes, edges, or subgraphs.
donatj 4y ago
Graphviz is one of those things I wish I had found much much earlier in my career. It makes throwing together a little one off tools to chart data relationships effortless.
NortySpock 4y ago
Out of curiosity, has anyone settled on a method for storing and surfacing metadata about a node? Example: a server has an IP address, dns entries, a description, and some other fields, and it connects to other servers. Is all of that meta information in a JSON object in the key-value area of the node in the .dot file?
hammeiam 4y ago
I use graphviz via networkx to build a dependency tree for my company's app. I'm able to split one master tree into sub-trees based on which "flow" I want to look at. img: https://imgur.com/7qCKA1G https://imgur.com/7qCKA1G code: https://github.com/hammeiam/saddle-data-graph/blob/master/Saddle%20Data%20Graph.ipynb https://github.com/hammeiam/saddle-data-graph/blob/master/Sa...
geoffbp 4y ago
https://diagrams.mingrammer.com https://diagrams.mingrammer.com is great - requires graphviz
kcartlidge 4y ago
Graphviz is excellent. I use it for (amongst other things) generating diagrams of states and transitions, and also for automatically mapping choices as I write interactive fiction. More generally I've added it to Newt [1], which is my in-progress C# code generator. It scans a PostgreSQL database to automatically generate a class library with models and EF Core data contexts. As part of that it writes out a dot notation Graphviz source file for showing the tables and relationships. The repo includes an example image [2] - it only shows a couple of tables, but it gives an idea of what can be produced (and also shows the .dot source file that was created to produce it). [1] https://github.com/kcartlidge/Newt https://github.com/kcartlidge/Newt [2] https://github.com/kcartlidge/Newt#created-graphviz https://github.com/kcartlidge/Newt#created-graphviz Edit: If anyone does C and has skills or money available (I don't) the Graphviz README says "This project has only 3 of its founders remaining as volunteer maintainers, and support is limited and may end soon. If you can help fund to a more formal foundation to continue this project, please contact north on graphviz org."

205 points by nikolay 4y ago

Changelog: https://gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz/-/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md https://gitlab.com/graphviz/graphviz/-/blob/main/CHANGELOG.m...

ognyankulev 4y ago
No idea why v7 is trending now. The big changes (moving to C99) are in v3 from 2022-02-26.
- topaz0 4y ago
  That's a lot of major versions in just a few months!
  - shaftway 4y ago
    Looks like they consider any breaking change a major rev bump. And it looks like most releases since then have had at least one breaking change.

jokoon 4y ago

I used graphviz to process the output of clang format, to visualize function calls between functions. The output was quite messy. I don't really know for to give clues to it, I tried several options.

_flux 4y ago

Great tool and nice to see such active development on it! From 3.0.0 to 7.0.0 just during this year, though.. ? I guess very few are depending on the library interfaces which I imagine are being broken, or do the major version increments just signify nothing of importance?-)

Bootvis 4y ago
It seems to me that they bumped the major version for every breaking change in the changelog. I guess that is in strict compliance with semantic versioning but indeed it looks strange.
- NetOpWibby 4y ago
  Wild, seeing SemVer actually used properly.
  - Arainach 4y ago
    You don't need to do a new release for every checkin. You can make a series of breaking changes and only then declare a new release, bumping the version number. After all, it took (at least) 21 years to get from 0 to 3.0.0 There's absolutely no reason for 2 major bumps 11 days apart.
    - egwor 4y ago
      If you’re doing CI/CD, though, you should expect this kind of thing. I do appreciate that maybe there could be a throttle for major bumps.
      - Arainach 4y ago
        If you're doing CI/CD and pulling from head rather than official published versions, you deserve what you get. If you mean the graphviz project itself, version numbers are meaningless to it internally.
    - The_Colonel 4y ago
      > You can make a series of breaking changes and only then declare a new release That means you need to postpone the breaking changes for a while, kind of bunching them together. Many projects do that, but it also incurs some cost. > After all, it took (at least) 21 years to get from 0 to 3.0.0 It's possible that they did not implement semantic changes in the strict sense before and included small breaking changes into non-major releases (I think a lot of software does this). Fast changes of version numbers may just mean they started reflecting each small BC break into the version number.

currycurry16 4y ago

One of the better graph visualization tools! Which tool do you people use most often for graph visualization? I kind of linger between networkx, Gephi, graphviz and d3.

specproc 4y ago
I really struggle with this. I also use networkx, Gephi, and graphviz, and occasionally plotly. D3 is too much of a learning overhead for me at the moment. I'm really in the market for a decent engine that's both easy to use and enables high quality interactive exploration of massive datasets. Plotly comes close, but struggles with larger datasets and is still a bit fiddly. I'd love to be able to lob a large structure into a UI and share with colleagues, and they'd be able to visualise and filter based on node/edge metadata, time series etc. Something like Gephi, but web-based and considerably easier to use.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jcims 4y ago
  Agree. Neo4j’s visualization tools are surprisingly painful to use. I’d love to find something that allowed you to trivially add code to the layout engine. Graphviz’s clustering capability seems to be unique among any of the tools I’ve used as well.
  - specproc 4y ago
    Gephi can cluster, but the algorithm isn't that transparent or flexible. I've increasingly found myself doing the clustering in Python and rendering in Gephi.
- lmeyerov 4y ago
  That's why we built Graphistry :) Can be used code-free (drop in a csv or log file) or via analysis workflows like from Jupyter notebooks and internal dashboards. We are roughly parity for Gephi's features, and pushing (far) ahead on web, GPU, perf, ai, automation, etc. Always curious about gaps - our Slack is a good place to chat on that.

m_eiman 4y ago

From the readme: "This project has only 3 of its founders remaining as volunteer maintainers, and support is limited and may end soon. If you can help fund to a more formal foundation to continue this project, please contact north on graphviz org."

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
graphviz 4y ago
You can ask us anything here. The community should applaud the efforts of Magnus Jacobsson, Mark Hansen, Matthew Fernandez, Steve Roush, and recently Costa Shulyupin to support graphviz in a more disciplined and professional way. In hindsight, we got a lot of play by treating Graphviz as a research vehicle, but we weren't able to (or didn't choose to) direct a lot of effort into documentation, rewriting existing code, sorting out feature interaction, developing very polished front ends, or broadening the scope of the effort. Or finding a new home after AT&T Labs lost its enthusiasm.
Karliss 4y ago
I am glad to see that they recently (relative to project age) got two new developers which have for the last two years actively worked on rejuvenating the project, tackling some long standing issues, and actually making new releases with bugfixes. That message was added to README before that. Of course it doesn't mean people should stop supporting the project, but I am currently less worried about future of graphviz than the last time I looked into the state of it.

rcarmo 4y ago

I liked GraphViz a lot, but eventually got frustrated with its layout algorithms and default look and feel. I would switch to Mermaid wholesale if it could render SVGs without requiring a browser engine.

comfypotato 4y ago
I’ve personally settled on grapviz (a derivative actually, plantuml) being “good enough” for casual diagrams. Plantuml is built with the idea that it’s for quick and dirty communication, and I think graphviz translates well to this. It’s a nice way to put together a sequence diagram that just helps you understand control flow (and then never took at it again). I have to admit, I haven’t found a more formal programmatic tool. Ultimately I have to turn to “by hand” tools if I want something more complicated. If you can’t translate that last statement, it means I just never do anything more complicated.
- xamde 4y ago
  The next step are tools like featdoc which let you define systems and interaction rules which then generate a (mermaid) sequence diagram. Example at https://dev.azure.com/itmv/Coffee%20Shop/_wiki/wikis/Coffee-Shop.wiki/5/Lunch-Customer-(in-a-hurry) https://dev.azure.com/itmv/Coffee%20Shop/_wiki/wikis/Coffee-... Project at https://github.com/Calpano/featdoc https://github.com/Calpano/featdoc Disclosure: I maintain this project
- fsiefken 4y ago
  For mermaid, would pairing it with selenium and/or a headless browser be an option?
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    Heck no. Why can't it generate the SVG without a browser?
  - comfypotato 4y ago
    Not sure if this question is directed at me. My understanding is that mermaid is relatively similar to plantuml in that it doesn't give you 100% control over layout and diagram features. What plantuml lacks (maybe mermaid less so) could really only be improved upon by working with raw svg I think. There is a LaTex package tikz that offer much more flexibility than plantuml/mermaid, but you still run into limitations in that diagram features are predefined.

hardware2win 4y ago

Really handy tool Probably saved me a ton of time that I would spend on implementing visualization myself

jhsinger27 4y ago
same here

Torlan 4y ago

I made a DOT language module for BBEdit if anyone is interested https://github.com/VadimMuhtarov/DOT-BBEdit-CLM https://github.com/VadimMuhtarov/DOT-BBEdit-CLM

rad_gruchalski 4y ago

Someone needs to make a multi-OS clone of omniGraffle. I paid €179 for omniGraffle, I’d pay for a multi-OS alternative.

nine_k 4y ago
Does omniGraffle accept text input? Because one of the points of GraphViz is text input, which can be easily source-controlled, diffed, machine-generated, etc.
- leejoramo 4y ago
  Yes Omnigraffle accepted Graphviz files. But uses its own excellent layout engine and allows you to adjust the layout by hand. If you include integration with OmniOutliner, you also get Graffle can also use a wide variety of text based outline file formats. https://support.omnigroup.com/doc-assets//OmniGraffle-Mac/OmniGraffle-Mac-v7.0.0.1/en/EPUB/xhtml/0301_import.xhtml https://support.omnigroup.com/doc-assets//OmniGraffle-Mac/Om...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - taeric 4y ago
    Amusingly, graphviz had dotty way back in the day so that you could adjust by hand. Now, it looks like they have gvedit. I haven't tried that one. That said, the ability to "fix" the location of some items by providing it in the dot file is a feature most folks seem to ignore. Or not know exists.
egwor 4y ago
I objected to how often I had to upgrade the version and pay for very minor fixes.
- Arcanum-XIII 4y ago
  I bought it 5 years ago and haven't given them a dime since, and got a lot of new feature since (scripting!). I'd love to have more library, but that's another issue :)

david_p 4y ago

This is more for diagramming small graphs. If you are trying to render large networks, there are better alternatives. For OSS graph visualization libraries, check out: - Sigma.js - Vis.js For commercial options: - Ogma (disclosure: my company builds that one) - KeyLines

isitmadeofglass 4y ago
You can’t mention commercial options without mentioning yWorks. Their product is absolutely amazing and I’d use it for everything if it wasn’t for the steep cost.
- ygra 4y ago
  As someone working at yWorks on yFiles, thanks for the kind words :-) Having used Graphviz extensively over the years as well, the cost of yFiles is certainly unfortunate, but I guess we simply serve a different markt segment than Graphviz or D3. (On a somewhat related note: Our online graph editor, yEd Live, support parsing a subset of Graphviz' syntax and that enables running at least some yFiles layout algorithms on Graphviz graphs. No export back, though.)
- lmeyerov 4y ago
  (Big fan of graphviz, it was such a shame when AT&T pulled funding!) Maybe helpful, more for visual graph data analysis than say arch diagramming: we build Graphistry specifically for interactively analyzing more data than these tools, eg, GPU client + GPU server, and being more batteries-included. The free Graphistry Hub site is similar to diagrams.net and GitHub for folks who aren't self-hosting GPUs. We are still working towards OSS'ing the core renderer, but all our new graph neural networks + graph compute + graph layout layers are all already OSS-first (see PyGraphistry), and we are part of the apache arrow + rapids communities. If your kind of thing, we are very much hiring :)
einpoklum 4y ago
Are Sigma and Vis widely-usable (i.e. have C bindings), or only for browsers/JS enginers?
4y ago

samsquire 4y ago

I use Graphviz dot syntax to configure entire cloud computing environments in the order they must be built. This is pipelines as code and infrastructure as code It's very powerful! Not every organisation can bring up an entire environment with one command of documentation their infrastructure with Graphviz. Here is a executable diagram of a build worker cloud nodes, Kubernetes, consul, vault, Debian package server, Java app, SSH bastion, Prometheus, grafana, DNS and security groups. https://github.com/samsquire/mazzle/blob/master/docs/architecture.png https://github.com/samsquire/mazzle/blob/master/docs/archite... The tool also parallelises the build based on the graph so for example packer builds can run in parallel. https://devops-pipeline.com/ https://devops-pipeline.com/ It also has a GUI but as a tool it's not ready for other people to use.

fsiefken 4y ago
o wow! i know that graphana can be used with mermaid diagrams, but this is a whole new (lower) level. it would be nice if the graphviz could be styled a bit nices (like with sketchviz), but that's icing on the cake.
jeffparsons 4y ago
Holy macaroni, this is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. I wonder if a top-level post of this could generate some interesting discussions about other people's exotic approaches to "DevOps", too?
- samsquire 4y ago
  Unfortunately I tried promoting my things too much so most of my submissions are blocked by the self promotion filter. Yes I would love to hear other people's solutions to DevOps problems. I find it an interesting space. There's lots of good ideas but they haven't been brought together.
DanielBMarkham 4y ago
Very cool. I created an analysis compiler that takes intent information and makes it part of the Enterprise DevSecOps pipeline in order to share realtime analysis with the entire organization. As I continued that work, I've also started talking about the feasibility of creating a supercompiler. GraphViz is the shit, man. It was exactly what I needed to work on this material. You can create your own notation and then couple it with all kinds of tech by way of batch. Highly recommended.* *The hardest part, frankly, was unlearning all of the other diagramming paradigms I've used. YMMV, but I found GraphViz most useful when you're going completely greenfield.

nu11ptr 4y ago

I love GraphViz. Many are saying the layout isn't that great and there are better options, etc. etc. and I have no doubt that for some use cases, that might be true. However, GraphViz "just works" for me. Every time I build a tree-like structure, I simply open up a new .gv file and just start typing nodes connected with an arrow ("->"). I can do this without taking ANY extra time - I just type it in as I'm developing the structure. When I'm done, I have a very nice diagram. For the more complex ones I add some color or other small details, but often they are simple black and white unidirectional graphs. I keep them open while I work and they help me visually see my structures which helps me see the problem domain more accurately and write better code.

denysvitali 4y ago
Shouldn't the extension be .dot?
- TYMorningCoffee 4y ago
  .gz is already used by gzip[1]. This wiki[2] says it is .gv . I've always used .dot so I don't know what to use anymore. edit: according to this[3] discussion , Microsoft uses .dot. I then found this wiki[4] page that supports the claim. dot is used by Microsoft Word document template files. I will switch to .gv [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_(graph_description_languag... [3] https://forum.graphviz.org/t/what-is-the-file-extension-for-dot-file/35 https://forum.graphviz.org/t/what-is-the-file-extension-for-... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_filename_extensions_(A%E2%80%93E) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_filename_extensions_(A... [4]
  - ctenb 4y ago
    I've used .dot in the past and stumbled upon issues with git related tools (I believe git diff) interpreting the .dot file as a word related file. I'm using .gv now.

ropeladder 4y ago

Does anyone know of any DOT -> mermaidjs format converters? I was looking for one recently and was surprised not to find anything more robust than someone's quick search and replace script.

graphviz 4y ago
Does anyone want to look at porting the mermaid layout method back to Graphviz? It might be useful to people. I guess some friction would be around the kind of awkward way that Graphviz has to deal with objects that aren't strictly nodes, edges, or subgraphs.

donatj 4y ago

Graphviz is one of those things I wish I had found much much earlier in my career. It makes throwing together a little one off tools to chart data relationships effortless.

NortySpock 4y ago

Out of curiosity, has anyone settled on a method for storing and surfacing metadata about a node? Example: a server has an IP address, dns entries, a description, and some other fields, and it connects to other servers. Is all of that meta information in a JSON object in the key-value area of the node in the .dot file?

hammeiam 4y ago

I use graphviz via networkx to build a dependency tree for my company's app. I'm able to split one master tree into sub-trees based on which "flow" I want to look at. img: https://imgur.com/7qCKA1G https://imgur.com/7qCKA1G code: https://github.com/hammeiam/saddle-data-graph/blob/master/Saddle%20Data%20Graph.ipynb https://github.com/hammeiam/saddle-data-graph/blob/master/Sa...

geoffbp 4y ago

https://diagrams.mingrammer.com https://diagrams.mingrammer.com is great - requires graphviz

kcartlidge 4y ago

Graphviz is excellent. I use it for (amongst other things) generating diagrams of states and transitions, and also for automatically mapping choices as I write interactive fiction. More generally I've added it to Newt [1], which is my in-progress C# code generator. It scans a PostgreSQL database to automatically generate a class library with models and EF Core data contexts. As part of that it writes out a dot notation Graphviz source file for showing the tables and relationships. The repo includes an example image [2] - it only shows a couple of tables, but it gives an idea of what can be produced (and also shows the .dot source file that was created to produce it). [1] https://github.com/kcartlidge/Newt https://github.com/kcartlidge/Newt [2] https://github.com/kcartlidge/Newt#created-graphviz https://github.com/kcartlidge/Newt#created-graphviz Edit: If anyone does C and has skills or money available (I don't) the Graphviz README says "This project has only 3 of its founders remaining as volunteer maintainers, and support is limited and may end soon. If you can help fund to a more formal foundation to continue this project, please contact north on graphviz org."