jekyll-plantuml

Background

PlantUML is a component that allows to quickly write:

• sequence diagram,
• use case diagram,
• class diagram,
• activity diagram,
• component diagram,
• state diagram
• object diagram

I really like the idea of writing UML diagram with plain text, and the syntax of it is very well designed, so I use PlantUML with trac and sphinx. After switching Octopress to my blog platform, I was looking for a way to integrate PlantUML within it, though I can't find one, so I wrote this very simple jekyll plugin (Octopress is based on Jekyll).

Installation

To use with Octopress, you need to put the plantuml.rb under the plugins folder, or you can use git's submodules to add jekyll-plantuml under plugins folder.

You need to download the plantuml.jar file from http://plantuml.sourceforge.net/download.html

If you use jekyll-plantuml to generate any UML diagrams other than sequence diagram, you have to install Graphviz as well. Only the dot command is used.

Configuration

Add below configurations into _config.yml:

plantuml:
  plantuml_jar: _bin/plantuml.jar     # path to plantuml jar
  tmp_folder: _plantuml               # tmp folder to put generated image files
  dot_exe: c:/graphviz/bin/dot.exe    # [optional] path to Graphviz dot execution
  background_color: white             # [optional] UML image background color

Usage

Just wrap the diagram text in "plantuml" block, e.g.

{% plantuml %}
Alice -> Bob: Authentication Request
Bob --> Alice: Authentication Response

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