mkdocs-diagrams

A plugin for the MkDocs documentation site generator which facilitates easy embedding of system architecture diagrams through the Diagrams project (view examples).

Installation

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.)

Usage

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)

Configuration

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)