structurizr-site-generatr VS d2

Recently been doing the same amongst our various teams since we have a mish-mash of Lucidchart, Miro, and other collaborative design tools.

One thing I was experimenting with (read: struggling with!) was a way to keep per-service (per-repo) architecture workspaces which are also synchronized on-commit to a central workspace and used !include to bind them together. The moving parts are not difficult - but writing your DSLs in a way that can handle this can be. This idea would let individual projects be self-sufficient and generate their own README doc diagrams as part of their own build process; but also have a central site which shows all the services as well as inter-service connectivity.

Did you ever consider https://github.com/avisi-cloud/structurizr-site-generatr to bring together your ADRs in with your architecture, or do you keep them separate?

While not embedded in markdown, I like d2 [1]. I can use it with org-babel to embed and view the diagrams on emacs. After using graphviz for years, the visual output seems more polished to me. With that said, I want to give pikchr a try.

[1]:https://d2lang.com/

In the next post I'll deep-dive into the D2 language which also has a huge set of features. Stay tuned.

That site is created by the maintainers of D2[1], so it might be biased, but I still think D2 has the friendliest syntax of the bunch, including nomnoml.

[1]: https://d2lang.com/

I've been using https://structurizr.com/ to automatically generate C4 diagrams from a model (rather than drawing them by hand). It works well with the approach for written documentation as proposed in https://arc42.org/. It's very easy to embed a C4 diagram into a markdown document.

The result is a set of documents and diagrams under version control that can be rendered using the structurizr documentation server (for interactive diagrams and indexed search).

I also use https://d2lang.com/ for declarative diagrams in addition to C4, e.g., sequence diagrams and https://adr.github.io/ for architectural decision records. These are also well integrated into structurizr.