Entity Relationship Diagrams

[engineervix]

The changes introduced here allow for creating entity relationship diagrams via django-extensions and graphviz.

This may be helpful in the early stages of the implementation of the new design, as we look at things such as the field specification and harmonisation of field names / attrributes between FE and BE.

The intention is not to merge this to the main branch, but rather to serve as reference. To be closed when no longer needed.

To generate a diagram:

1. checkout the diagrams branch and build the Docker images

   git checkout diagrams && \
   fab build

2. Spin up the containers, and SSH into the web container

   fab start && fab sh

3. In the container, run

   ./manage.py graph_models \
    blog \
    events \
    impact_reports \
    navigation \
    people \
    propositions \
    services \
    sign_up_form \
    taxonomy \
    torchbox \
    work \
    images \
    --pygraphviz --rankdir BT -o er_diagram.png

What we are doing above is generating a diagram for specified Django apps on the project. Feel free to modify the above command as you please. See https://django-extensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/graph_models.html#example-usage for usage examples.

Note

If, for some reason, you don't see the generated file on your computer (this happened to me), then copy it from the docker container to the local filesystem. Here's what I did

❯ docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                  COMMAND                  CREATED              STATUS              PORTS                                                                                                      NAMES
d7bfc727cc4e   wagtail-torchbox_web   "tail -f /dev/null"      About a minute ago   Up About a minute   0.0.0.0:3000->3000/tcp, :::3000->3000/tcp, 0.0.0.0:8000-8001->8000-8001/tcp, :::8000-8001->8000-8001/tcp   wagtail-torchbox_web_1
4c5f1bed9f62   postgres:13.12         "docker-entrypoint.s…"   2 hours ago          Up About a minute   5432/tcp                                                                                                   wagtail-torchbox_db_1
761fb77de157   redis:6.0              "docker-entrypoint.s…"   2 hours ago          Up About a minute   6379/tcp                                                                                                   wagtail-torchbox_redis_1
❯ docker cp d7bfc727cc4e:/app/er_diagram.png er_diagram.png