A plugin for the MkDocs documentation site generator which facilitates easy embedding of system architecture diagrams through the Diagrams project (view examples).
mkdocs-diagrams
is available on PyPI.
It can be installed through pip install mkdocs-diagrams
or equivalent command with pipenv or poetry.
You'll also need to have the graphviz dot
tool installed on your system.
It's available as graphviz
in most package managers.
Once installed, configure MkDocs to use this plugin by including diagrams
in the plugins
list in your mkdocs.yml
.
For example:
plugins:
- diagrams
- search
(If you don't have a plugins
key in your config yet, you'll almost surely want to include search
as well.
It's a default plugin that will otherwise get deactivated.)
Warning: This plugin will execute
.diagram.py
files during build, as that is how Diagrams itself operates. Be careful using this plugin with untrusted input as this effectively allows arbitrary code execution.
Once installed, the diagrams plugin can be used by including diagrams files in your docs directory.
For example, create a file named example.diagrams.py
with the following contents:
from diagrams import Cluster, Diagram
from diagrams.aws.compute import ECS, EKS, Lambda
from diagrams.aws.database import Redshift
from diagrams.aws.integration import SQS
from diagrams.aws.storage import S3
with Diagram("Event Processing", show=False):
source = EKS("k8s source")
with Cluster("Event Flows"):
with Cluster("Event Workers"):
workers = [ECS("worker1"),
ECS("worker2"),
ECS("worker3")]
queue = SQS("event queue")
with Cluster("Processing"):
handlers = [Lambda("proc1"),
Lambda("proc2"),
Lambda("proc3")]
store = S3("events store")
dw = Redshift("analytics")
source >> workers >> queue >> handlers
handlers >> store
handlers >> dw
When MkDocs is run (either with build
or serve
), this will result in a file named event_processing.png
being created.
Include this in your markdown files using regular image syntax: ![Event processing architecture](event_processing.png)
This plugin supports a few config options, which can be set as follows:
plugins:
- diagrams:
file_extension: ".diagrams.py"
max_workers: 5
file_extension
Sets the filename extension for diagram files.
When mkdocs build
or mkdocs serve
is run, all files ending in this extension will be executed.
Default: .diagrams.py
max_workers
A pool of workers is used to render diagram files in parallel on multi-core systems. Setting this allows you to limit the number of workers to this amount.
Default: Dynamically chosen (os.cpu_count() + 2
)