RailRoady generates Rails 3/4 model (ActiveRecord, Mongoid, Datamapper) and controller UML diagrams as cross-platform .svg files, as well as in the DOT language.
Code is based on the original “railroad” gem, patched and maintained over the years. Lineage can be traced via GitHub.
I (Preston Lee) am not trying to hijack Peter Hoeg or Javier’s project, but rather create a dedicated, lean gem that can be used without major issue on Rails v3 and v4 projects. Rails v2 is not supported.
You MUST have the the following utilities available at the command line.
* `dot` and `neato`. * `sed`, which should already be available on all sane UNIX systems.
MacPorts users can install in via
sudo port install graphviz
Brew user can install via
brew install graphviz
Ubuntu users can install in via
sudo apt-get install graphviz
The easiest (and recommend) usage is to include railroady as a development dependency with your Rails 3 Gemfile, like so…
group :development, :test do gem 'railroady' end
…and then run the master rake task…
rake diagram:all
This should generate four doc/*.svg files that can be opened in (most) web browsers as well as dedicated document viewers supporting the Scalable Vector Graphics format.
Generate diagram for models and controllers including those in the engines.
rake diagram:all_with_engines
Alternatively, you may run the ‘railroady’ command-line program at the Rails application’s root directory. You can redirect its output to a .dot file or pipe it to the dot or neato utilities to produce a graphic. Model diagrams are intended to be processed using dot and controller diagrams are best processed using neato.
railroady [options] command
Common options:
-b, --brief Generate compact diagram
(no attributes nor methods)
-s, --specify file1[,fileN] Specify given files only for the diagram
(can take a glob pattern)
-e, --exclude file1[,fileN] Exclude given files
(can take a glob pattern)
-i, --inheritance Include inheritance relations
-l, --label Add a label with diagram information
(type, date, migration, version)
-o, --output FILE Write diagram to file FILE
-v, --verbose Enable verbose output
(produce messages to STDOUT)
--alphabetize Sort methods alphabetically
Models diagram options:
-a, --all Include all models
(not only ActiveRecord::Base derived)
--all-columns Show all columns
(not just content columns)
--hide-magic Hide magic field names
--hide-types Hide attributes type
--hide-through Hide through associations
-j, --join Concentrate edges
-m, --modules Include modules
-p, --plugins-models Include plugins models
-z, --engine-models Include engine models
-t, --transitive Include transitive associations
(through inheritance)
Controllers diagram options:
--hide-public Hide public methods --hide-protected Hide protected methods --hide-private Hide private methods --engine-controllers Show engine controllers
Other options:
-h, --help Show this message
--version Show version and copyright
-M, --models Generate models diagram -C, --controllers Generate controllers diagram -A, --aasm Generate "acts as state machine" diagram
railroady -o models.dot -M Produces a models diagram to the file 'models.dot' railroady -a -i -o full_models.dot -M Models diagram with all classes showing inheritance relations railroady -M | dot -Tsvg > models.svg Model diagram in SVG format railroady -C | neato -Tpng > controllers.png Controller diagram in PNG format railroady -h Shows usage help
To produce a PNG image from model diagram generated by RailRoady you can issue the following command:
dot -Tpng models.dot > models.png
If you want to do the same with a controller diagram, use neato instead of dot:
neato -Tpng controllers.dot > controllers.png
If you want to produce SVG (vectorial, scalable, editable) files, you can do the following:
dot -Tsvg models.dot > models.svg neato -Tsvg controllers.dot > controllers.svg
Important: There is a bug in Graphviz tools when generating SVG files that cause a text overflow. You can solve this problem editing (with a text editor, not a graphical SVG editor) the file and replacing around line 12 “font-size:14.00;” by “font-size:11.00;”, or by issuing the following command (see “man sed”):
sed -i 's/font-size:14.00/font-size:11.00/g' file.svg
Note: For viewing and editing SVG there is an excellent opensource tool called Inkscape (similar to Adobe Illustrator. For DOT processing you can also use Omnigraffle (on Mac OS X).
As of Preston Lee’s Rails 3/4 modifications, including RailRoady as a project development dependency will automatically add a set of rake tasks to your project. Sweet! (Run ‘rake -T` to check them out.)
RailRoady has been tested with the following Ruby and Rails versions
-
1.9.2+
-
2.0.0+
-
3.0.3+
-
4.0.0+
There are no additional requirements (nevertheless, all your Rails application requirements must be installed).
In order to view/export the DOT diagrams, you’ll need the processing tools from Graphviz.
RailRoady is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
See LICENSE for details.
Copyright © 2007-2008 Javier Smaldone Copyright © 2009 Peter Hoeg Copyright © 2010 Preston Lee
See LICENSE for details.
See AUTHORS for details.