Ascii diagrams with dot, graph-easy and docker 15 Nov 2016

Sometimes I find myself in the situation to generate some diagrams.

It’s nice to use a human readable format like dot to define these diagrams. Unfortunately graphviz doesn’t have an assci output mode.

A perl module exists to fill this void called graph-easy. It’s also possible to run this perl module via docker.

To generate graphs on the command line with docker and graph-easy you can run this command:

echo '[a]->[b]' | docker run -i tsub/graph-easy

Here is the result

+---+     +---+
| a | --> | b |
+---+     +---+

That’s it. You now have a ascii diagram of your graphviz. After the initial docker run, the command takes around a second to execute. This is fast enough for my purposes.

Learnings

• Use docker to run on-off tasks without cluttering your main computer.
• Use docker in combination with your regular shell scripts and within pipes.
• Docker can function as a operation system independent package manager.
• I can finally use perl modules without installing them in my system.