GraphViz

GraphViz is an incredibly powerful tool for generating diagrams based on a textual representation of the relationships between nodes. It is a great place to start if you're trying to represent something like a road map, but writing it all by hand can be a bit tedious.

Fortunately, we've built a tool to convert your roadmap.yml file into DOT, GraphViz's textual graph description format.

Usage

Prerequisites

Our GraphViz conversion tool is written in Go, so you'll need to make sure you've installed that on your machine. We recommend Go 1.16+ since it'll let you run the conversion tool without needing to clone the repo or do any manual building.

Once you have Go installed, run the following to get the project and make the tool available to run.

# This installs the roadmap tool in your Go binaries folder.
go install github.com/SierraSoftworks/roadmap/tools/roadmap@latest

Conversion

To convert your roadmap.yml file into its DOT representation, try running the following command. It'll write the result to your terminal, but if you'd prefer, you can write it to a file as well.

roadmap render graphviz --in roadmap.yml

roadmap render graphviz --in roadmap.yml --out roadmap.dot

Output

The output generated by this tool is a DOT file which can then be rendered using GraphViz. One of the quickest ways to get started is to use an online GraphViz renderer like GraphViz Online to view the result.

Rendered