mongo-express VS mermaid-cli

I like mongo express you can give it a try https://github.com/mongo-express/mongo-express

MongoDB: Network details (name, host, number of participants) are stored in MongoDB. When in development mode, Mongo Express is available at http://localhost:8081, and provides a web-based administrative interface.

The Makefile contains common bash commands that I use for tasks like starting and stopping the containers, seeding data, seeing logs etc. The docker-compose.yaml file contains definitions for the different services such as the database service, the API itself and a mongo-express service for easy database administration. Source code for the API lives inside src. Top level structure of that directory is as follows -

mongo-express maybe?

https://github.com/mongo-express/mongo-express

But if couchDB works, it works. Personally I'd love to shoehorn LISP into everything I do, but most of the time I just use python and bash because things tend to get done faster when I do.

you can use mermaid-cli to create pngs/svgs

I come from past experiments with (py)graphviz, yed, probably a couple other forgotten things. (As well as manual diagrams in LucidChart and even Inkscape.) And am generally a non-web python guy.

I was looking at Mermaid last weekend, since a coworker has praised it a few times and I was wanting to play with it.

I think my expectation of how to use it was wrong? I typically expect to share my diagrams as .png files. The main documentation didn't seem to give much guidance in this usecase.

I ended up going to https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli ... there didn't seem to be a simple install-and-use pathway similar to `apt` or `pip`, so I ended up trying the docker image for it. I got it working to create pngs, but I thought having to mess with docker volume mounts and defining my own aliases (`alias mermaid='docker run -u $UID -it --rm -v ~/mermaid:/data minlag/mermaid-cli -i'` so I can do `mermaid blah.mmd` in my ~/mermaid folder) was a bit cumbersome...

Just sharing to see if there's hot takes on where I went wrong, I guess. (for example, I certainly didn't extensively read the docs to understand the usage paradigm it's intended for)

node cli tool if java isn’t your thing. https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli