filare 1.3.0

Easily document cables and wiring harnesses

filare (formerly WireViz)

Summary

Filare (the new name for WireViz) is a tool for documenting cables, wiring harnesses and connector pinouts. It takes plain text, YAML-formatted files as input and produces graphical output (SVG, PNG, ...) via GraphViz. It handles automatic BOM (Bill of Materials) creation and a number of extras.

Why Filare over WireViz?

• The file structure has been revamped for better separation of concern
• Tests have been added to increase dramatically the coverage of the library
• Jinja2 templates are now used for key visual elements
• Pydantic is used instead of dataclasses to bring the data structure into the 2020s
• Support for engineering document export is much better, allowing sharing with suppliers and clients directly
• The representation is backward-compatible when possible, so the user should be able to switch seemlessly

Features

• Filare input files are fully text based
  • No special editor required
  • Human readable
  • Easy version control
  • YAML syntax
  • UTF-8 input and output files for special character support
• Understands and uses color abbreviations as per IEC 60757 (black=BK, red=RD, ...)
• Auto-generates standard wire color schemes and allows custom ones if needed
  • DIN 47100 (WT/BN/GN/YE/GY/PK/BU/RD/BK/VT/...)
  • IEC 60757 (BN/RD/OR/YE/GN/BU/VT/GY/WT/BK/...)
  • 25 Pair Color Code (BUWH/WHBU/OGWH/WHOG/GNWH/WHGN/BNWH/...)
  • TIA/EIA 568 A/B (Subset of 25-Pair, used in CAT-5/6/...)
• Understands wire gauge in mm² or AWG
  • Optionally auto-calculates equivalent gauge between mm² and AWG
• Is suitable for both very simple cables, and more complex harnesses.
• Allows for easy-autorouting for 1-to-1 wiring
• Generates BOM (Bill of Materials)

Note: Filare is not designed to represent the complete wiring of a system. Its main aim is to document the construction of individual wires and harnesses.

Examples

Demo 01

Filare input file:

connectors:
  X1:
    type: D-Sub
    subtype: female
    pinlabels: [DCD, RX, TX, DTR, GND, DSR, RTS, CTS, RI]
  X2:
    type: Molex KK 254
    subtype: female
    pinlabels: [GND, RX, TX]

cables:
  W1:
    gauge: 0.25 mm2
    length: 0.2
    color_code: DIN
    wirecount: 3
    shield: true

connections:
  - - X1: [5, 2, 3]
    - W1: [1, 2, 3]
    - X2: [1, 3, 2]
  - - X1: 5
    - W1: s

Output file:

Bill of Materials (auto-generated)

Demo 02

Source - Bill of Materials

Syntax, tutorial and example gallery

Read the syntax description to learn about Filare's features and how to use them.

See the tutorial page for sample code, as well as the example gallery to see more of what Filare can do.

Installation

Requirements

Filare requires Python 3.9 or later.

Filare requires GraphViz to be installed in order to work. See the GraphViz download page for OS-specific instructions.

Note: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS users in particular may need to separately install Python 3.7 or above, as that comes with Python 3.6 as the included system Python install. The option to generate pdf is not supported for python 3.7, so it might not be possible to use with this version of Ubuntu. If you are forced to use Ubuntu 18.04 for some reason, fill up an issue/MR and I can provide a Docker image to perform the generation.

Container (Ubuntu 24.04, uv, graphviz, prettier)

A Docker image is provided to avoid local dependency setup:

docker build -t filare:latest .

Run common tasks (mount your working tree so outputs land on the host):

• Build all examples/tutorials/demos:

  docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/app filare uv run --no-sync python src/filare/tools/build_examples.py
  

• Build examples only:

  docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/app filare uv run --no-sync filare examples/ex*.yml -d examples/metadata.yml -f hs -o outputs/examples
  

• Build tutorials only:

  docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/app filare uv run --no-sync filare tutorial/tutorial*.yml -d tutorial/metadata.yml -f hs -o outputs/tutorial
  

• Lint (black + prettier):

  docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/app filare ./scripts/lint.sh
  

• Build and serve docs (port 9000):

  docker run --rm -p 9000:9000 -v "$PWD":/app filare bash -lc 'cd /app && uv run --no-sync mkdocs build && cd site && python3 -m http.server 9000'
  

• Regenerate document YAMLs (document representations) and control overwrites:
  • By default generated *.document.yaml files can be overwritten on rebuild. To freeze a document, set allow_override: false for that entry in outputs/*/document_hashes.yaml; reruns will then warn and keep your manual edits.
  • To force a refresh, delete the corresponding *.document.yaml and its entry in document_hashes.yaml before rebuilding.

Building docs locally (without Docker)

From the project root:

uv run --no-sync mkdocs build
python3 -m http.server 9000 --directory site

Then open http://localhost:9000.

• Run tests:

  docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/app filare uv run --no-sync pytest
  

Documentation (MkDocs + optional Sphinx)

• Build MkDocs site locally:

  uv run --no-sync mkdocs build
  

• Serve for preview:

  uv run --no-sync mkdocs serve -a 0.0.0.0:8000
  

• (Optional) Generate API docs with Sphinx: see docs/mkdocs.md for suggested setup.

Debian Dependencies

sudo apt install graphviz

Fedora Dependencies

sudo dnf install graphviz

Pango (only for weasyprint pdf generation)

See https://pango.gnome.org/

Installing the latest release

The latest Filare release can be downloaded from PyPI with the following command:

pip3 install filare

Installing the development version

Access to the current state of the development branch can be gained by cloning the repo and installing manually.

We suggest always installing Filare within a python virtualenv. This avoids many issues caused by dependencies management.

Installing Filare within a virtual env

# Cloning the repository
git clone git+https://github.com/laurierloi/Filare
cd Filare

# Setup virtualenv
python3 -m pip install --user virtualenv
python3 -m virtualenv venv-filare
source venv-filare/bin/activate

# Installing/Upgrading dependencies
pip install -U pip setuptools wheel

# Installing with local modification tracking
pip install -e .

If you would like to contribute to this project, make sure you read the contribution guidelines!

Usage

How to run

The Filare CLI (legacy filare alias still available) creates harness documents. To do so, a shared metadata file (or multiple) must be provided to the filare command. Then, a list of harnesses to include within the document should also be provided. In the simplest case, 1 harness can be provided.

$ filare -d ~/path/to/file/metadata.yml ~/path/to/file/myharness1.yml ~/path/to/file/myharness2.yml

Depending on the options specified, this will output some or all of the following files:

titlepage.html            Titlepage document. It has links to the different harness for easy navigation
shared_bom.tsv            A BOM (bill of materials) for all items within the harness document
myharness{1,2}.gv         GraphViz output
myharness{1,2}.svg        Wiring diagram as vector image
myharness{1,2}.png        Wiring diagram as raster image
myharness{1,2}.bom.tsv    BOM (bill of materials) as tab-separated text file
myharness{1,2}.html       HTML page with wiring diagram and BOM embedded

Wildcars in the file path are also supported to process multiple files at once, e.g.:

$ filare ~/path/to/files/*.yml

To see how to specify the output formats, as well as additional options, run:

$ filare --help

Sample run all examples

$ filare -d examples/metadata.yml examples/ex*.yml

Then open examples/titlepage.html to open the document root

(Re-)Building the example projects

Please see the documentation of the build_examples.py script for info on building the demos, examples and tutorial.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md

Status

This is very much a work in progress. Source code, API, syntax and functionality may change wildly at any time.

License

GPL-3.0