Are there any good Linux CLI tools for generating an ERD?

4 pointsiomcr4y ago4 comments

I'm attempting to make a ERD and most of what I find on google are just heavily SEO'd SaaS-wares begging me to pay $$ per month for the privilege of manually dragging my mouse around their slow websites for hours. I'm using postgres but I'm fine with anything that requires a little bit of scripting or config files as long as it doesn't require yet another free trial of barely useful. The non-free ones that I have tried, have huge usability issues such as requiring me to drag literally every table into the diagram, one by one, and also the auto-arrange feature made an obsurdly large diagram with cartoonishly high amounts of whitespace.

Long term, I'd like to be able to automatically generate 5-10 ERDs (because all-in-one is too big) of these as part of my CI/CD process for my documentation.

4 comments

marbu4y ago

I haven't worked with ERD for quite some time, but back when I did I used SQL Power Architect: http://www.bestofbi.com/page/architect

It's a java GUI application, offered via open core model (community version is GPLv3 licenced, and you can buy extensions and support), but the community version should be quite useful.

Wrt scripting, I expect that you can import schema of existing database and if I recall correctly, one could theoretically reuse the xslt transformations (which implements export features) outside of the app to eg. convert xml with the ERD diagram into html or sql script outside of the app (which could be useful for CI/CD).

java-man4y ago

Similarly to @marbu's anwer, there is AquaFold Data Studio product (paid) which can generate ERDs and also produce HTML output.

Displaimer: I wrote the ERD modeler, though I am not affiliated with the company or the product in any way.

rlw1014y ago

check out Graphviz, uses text files to create graphics, does a very good job with ERD and flow documents,

__d4y ago

If graphviz (per rlw101's comment) doesn't work,

maybe pic? (from groff)

or a few macros (maybe m4) and fig? (with fig2dev)

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