Date: 2013aug6 Product: Graphviz Keywords: dot, UML Q. Products like Dia and Visio are great but I want to keep the description of the diagram in a text file -- like source code -- so its easy to update. How do I convert a text description of a relationship into a graphic image? Is there a command-line equivalent of Dia/Visio? A. The solution I found is Graphviz. On Fedora do this:

dnf install graphviz

This installs a program called "dot" (and others). Make a new folder:

mkdir /usr/local/src/mydiagram cd /usr/local/src/mydiagram

Make a new file in that folder called "mydiagram.dot" and put this in it (from the dot man page):

digraph test123 { a->b->c; a->{xy}; b[shape=box]; c[label="hellonworld",color=blue,fontsize=24, fontname="Palatino-Italic",fontcolor=red,style=filled]; a->z[label="hi",weight=100]; x->z[label="multi-linenlabel"]; edge[style=dashed,color=red]; b->x; {rank=same;bx} }

Turn that code into a diagram:

dot -Tpng mydiagram.dot -o mydiagram.png

Take a look at mydiagram.png You can work this into your Makefile. More info http://www.graphviz.org PlantUML is another good text-based diagram maker https://plantuml.com