About

Inspired by viz-js, this is a tool that gives you live rendering as you edit graphviz dot files—serviz, it serves graphviz. Unlike viz-js, this tool lets you use your own editor and makes live collaboration possible. Yes, this was developed during the pandemic.

It is written in zsh, and gives you a function to start a server.

Install

Dependencies you need, and for each, if you are on MacOS, the simplest way to get them.

• graphviz
  • brew install graphviz
• browsersync
  1. brew install node
  2. npm install -g browser-sync
• fswatch
  • brew install fswatch

As for serviz itself, you can source this zsh however you'd like. I like antigen, where you can just pop antigen bundle https://github.com/pragmaticpandy/serviz.git before antigen apply in your .zshrc and that's it.

Usage

serviz DOT_FILE then open the displayed URL. When you make edits to the dot file, they will be reflected in the rendered webpage.

serviz --skeleton prints out some opinionated skeleton dot code for quickly starting new graphs.

Tips

1. In vim You can enable automatic writing to disk as you type with the following command:

   autocmd TextChanged,TextChangedI <buffer> silent write
   

2. You can view syntax errors in the serviz terminal window. If nothing is updating in the browser, syntax is likely why.
3. Remember you installed graphviz itself already, so when you are done, it can be used directly to export the graph: dot -T png -o OUTPUT_FILE DOT_FILE
4. For collaborative editing in vim you can use CoVim. However, CoVim needs vim compiled with Python 2 enabled, which most vim distributions do not. You can either:
   • Compile vim yourself with something like:

     sudo echo Installing vim...
     brew install python
     mkdir -p ~/installs
     (
         set -e
         cd ~/installs
         rm -rf vim
         git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git
         cd vim
         make distclean
         ./configure --enable-pythoninterp --enable-python3interp
         make
         sudo make install
     )
     
     echo Done.
     

   • Or install CoVim with an unmerged branch that migrated to python 3.