sysl-catalog

A markdown/html + Diagram generator for sysl specifications

Objective

The objective of sysl-catalog is to create the most seamless experience for developers to document their API behaviour, as well as creating a standardised way multiple teams can create documentation whilst gaining mutual benefit from already existing documentation.

Background

Let’s say that a team wants some diagrams to represent how their services interact with other services. First, the team needs to choose what format to use, then the team needs to decide on where the docs are going to be hosted, and how often they should be updated.

Let’s say that this team (Team A) chooses plantuml to create sequence, data model, and integration diagrams for their service. They choose to generate to a docs directory on their single repository and use some proto plugins to automate their markdown generation:

• Protoc-gen-doc to generate a digest of what how their protos are structured
• Protoc-gen-uml to generate plantuml diagrams to generate diagrams for the needed diagrams
• Manually written markdown to describe how their services interact with different services
• Manually written sequence diagrams to describe which dependencies are called

This works fine; the team has somewhat automated their documentation workflow, with some manual parts.

A couple of months pass and now there’s another team which relies on team A’s service heavily. They are releasing soon and need to create release documentation; so they decide to use the same method that Team A is using.

Now there’s a problem; there are two teams with two separate sets of documentation. Some of it is manual and some of it is automated. This can cause problems for multiple reasons;

1. Manually written parts might need to be repeated and might fall out of sync across the two sources
2. If manually written documentation isn't repeated then the representation of their dependency is limited by a hyperlink to Team A's documentation without fully integrating
3. The decoupling of documentation and code means that the documentation is most likely going to fall out of date
4. Because there’s no persistence between team A’s documentation and Team B; if team A make a very specific change it likely won’t show in team B’s documentation

This is what sysl-catalog is trying to solve

sysl-catalog uses the sysl language as an intermediary between different formats to be able to generate different views of how services work

What is sysl?

Sysl is a “system specification language”; think of it like swagger or protos, but a much higher level, and with the ability to represent not only types, applications and endpoints, but interactions between those applications and endpoints; it plans to define what the code does itself.

What does sysl-catalog do?

Sysl-catalog is just a static site generator.

Sysl-catalog parses a sysl file (with the .sysl extension) and represents it in a visual form; It can represent endpoints (in sequence diagrams) request/response types or database tables, as well as integration diagrams.

It uses go's text/template to do this, and if any addition is needed to be made, custom templates can be used (see templates for examples)

Installation

go

go get -u -v github.com/anz-bank/sysl-catalog

docker

• only recommended for --serve mode

  docker run --rm -p 6900:6900 -v $(pwd):/usr/:ro anzbank/sysl-catalog:latest input.sysl --serve

docker-compose

• see (demos)[demo/protos] for full example that includes .proto files

  
  version: '3.8'

services: plantuml-server: image: plantuml/plantuml-server:tomcat-v1.2020.13 ports:

• 8080:8080 protoc-gen-sysl: image: anzbank/protoc-gen-sysl:latest volumes:
• ./:/usr/files working_dir: /usr/ entrypoint: ["protoc", "--sysl_out=.", "files/simple.proto"] sysl-catalog: image: anzbank/sysl-catalog:latest volumes:
• ./:/usr/ environment:
• SYSL_PLANTUML=http://plantuml-server:8080 entrypoint: ["sysl-catalog", "-o", "docs", "project.sysl", "--imageDest", "docs/images"] depends_on:
• plantuml-server
• protoc-gen-sysl

How to use

1. Set up environment

export SYSL_TOKENS=github.com:<YOUR_TOKEN_HERE>

export SYSL_PLANTUML=http://www.plantuml.com/plantuml

On macOS, if your launchctl limit maxfiles setting is too low (e.g 256) you might see the error message "too many open files" when running make.

You can set the current session limit higher with:

sudo launchctl limit maxfiles 65536 200000

And add the following line to your .bash_profile or analogous file:

ulimit -n 65536 200000

2. Run

sysl-catalog -o <output directory> <input.sysl>

• You can optionally specify the --type=html if you want to generate html instead of markdown, which is useful for use with github pages, which you can see a demo of with this repo here

3. That's it (basically!)

   This will generate markdown with integration diagrams + sequence diagrams + data model diagrams as seen in demo/markdown/README.md or see html generation at demo/html/index.html.

Server Mode

sysl-catalog comes with a serve mode which will serve on port :6900 by default

sysl-catalog --serve <input.sysl>

This will start a server and filewatchers to watch the input file and its directories recursively, and any changes will automatically show:

Requirements

In demo/markdown/README.md we have an example with a couple of interesting parts:

1. @package attribute must be specified:

   • This will create a markdown page for ApplicationPackage as seen in demo/markdown/ApplicationPackage/README.md. Currently the package name is not inferred from the application name (MobileApp), so this needs to be added (ApplicationPackage).

     MobileApp:
     @package = "ApplicationPackage"
     Login(input <: Server.Request):
     Server <- Authenticate
     return ok <: MegaDatabase.Empty

2. Application names might need to be prefixed to parameter types if the type is defined in another application, since defined parameters are under scope of the application it is defined in:

   MobileApp:
   @package = "ApplicationPackage"
   +    Login(input <: Server.Request):
   -    Login(input <: Request):
       Server <- Authenticate
       return ok <: MegaDatabase.Empty

3. Add ~ignore to applications/projects that are to be ignored in the markdown creation

   ThisAppShouldntShow[~ignore]:
   NotMySystem:
       ...
   # Or ignore only specific endpoints
   ThisAppShouldShow[~ignore]:
   NotMySystem[~ignore]:
       ...

CLI options

Output default Markdown

sysl-catalog -o=docs/ filename.sysl

Output default HTML

sysl-catalog -o=docs/ --type=html filename.sysl

Run with custom templates

• With this the first template will be executed first, then the second sysl-catalog --templates=<fileName.tmpl>,<filename.tmpl> filename.sysl

Run in server mode

sysl-catalog --serve filename.sysl

Generate Redoc files

sysl-catalog --redoc filename.sysl This generates a Redoc page that serves the original .json or .yaml OpenAPI spec on Github. Currently only supports spec files located in the same repo, and must be run in a git repo (so that the remote url can be retrieved using git).

Run in server mode without css/rendered images

• good for rendering raw markdown

sysl-catalog --serve --noCSS filename.sysl

Run server with custom template

sysl-catalog --serve --templates=<fileName.tmpl>,<filename.tmpl> filename.sysl

• See templates/ for custom template examples

Command Details

$ sysl-catalog --help
usage: sysl-catalog [<flags>] <input>

Flags:
      --help                 Show context-sensitive help (also try --help-long and --help-man).
      --plantuml=PLANTUML    plantuml service to use
  -p, --port=":6900"         Port to serve on
      --type="markdown"      Type of output
  -o, --output=OUTPUT        OutputDir directory to generate to
  -v, --verbose              Verbose logs
      --templates=TEMPLATES  custom templates to use, separated by a comma
      --outputFileName=""    output file name for pages; {{.Title}}
      --serve                Start a http server and preview documentation
      --noCSS                disable adding css to served html
      --disableLiveReload    diable live reload
      --noImages             don't create images
      --embed                Embed images instead of creating svgs
      --mermaid              use mermaid diagrams where possible
      --redoc                generate redoc for specs imported from openapi. Must be run on a git repo.
      --imageDest=IMAGEDEST  Optional image directory destination (can be outside output)

Args:
  <input>  input sysl file to generate documentation for

Screenshots

project_view

package_view

Development

Prerequisites

• Go 1.14
• golangci-lint v1.29+
• docker
• chrome (used for mermaid diagram generation)