Quick Application Diagrams with Yard

Thanks to following awesome people on twitter I learned something I didn’t know about yard. That is can be used to create nice application diagrams. I saw a tweet from Matt Aimonetti, about generating diagrams with yard. I was interested in trying it out myself. After quickly installing graphviz which I apparently no longer had on my machine, I was rewarded with some nice diagrams for my rails apps. It also works well for gems as you can see from the churn graph below. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work completely out of the box on Sinatra apps, so I might need to learn a bit more configuration.

brew install graphviz
gem install yard
yard -n
yard graph --dependencies | dot -Tpdf -o app_diagram.pdf

Above was all that was needed to get rails app diagrams like those below.

Churn

Small Rails apps, Hearno

and finally NothingCalendar2