jekyll-liquid-plantuml-plugin

Installation

Just copy the liquid_plantuml.rb file to your _plugins folder.

Requirements

Obviously you must have a plantuml installation(plantuml)

Configuration

There are several configuration parameters that you can define in your _config.yml. Here is a sample of such items:

# ...
# ... your _config.yml file ...
# ...

# plantuml plugin
liquid_plantuml:
  debug: false
  center: true
  output_directory: /assets/uml
  uml_cmd: "java -jar ~/Tools/plantuml.jar -charset utf-8 $umlfile -o $output_directory" 

An explanation of those parameters follows:

• debug (boolean): Activates the debug mode with which you can see the compilation commands that are executed during build. Default value: false
• center (boolean): Center the final image or not. Default value: true
• output_directory (web path): Path in which the generated PNG will be placed. Default value: /assets/uml
• uml_cmd (string): Command line to execute for the .txt to .png conversion. Default value: java -jar ~/Tools/plantuml.jar -charset utf-8 $umlfile -o $output_directory

In these uml_cmd parameters you can use the following variables:

• $umlfile: Name of the UML input text file
• $output_directory: Name of the output directory

Usage

{% raw %} {% plantuml %} ... {% endplantuml %} {% endraw %}

Sample usage

You can type the following block of plantuml inside one of your posts:

{% plantuml %}
Alice -> Bob: Authentication Request
Bob --> Alice: Authentication Response
Alice -> Bob: Another authentication Request
Alice <-- Bob: another authentication Response    
{% endplantuml %}

And you will get it rendered like this:

Notes

• The plugin doesn't recompile a previously rendered block of plantuml. It takes into consideration a change in the text or a change in the arguments. This reduces the total time of the building process.

  Aside, you can delete all the contents of your Plantuml generated blocks in the source directory if you want to make a backup copy of your site. It will be completelly regenerated when you rebuild your site.

• Also, this plugin keeps the folder of generated images in a clean state. That is, there will be only those images that are used in your site. All previously generated images will be deleted if they are detected as orphaned from the posts.