Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Visualize your rails models and controllers

Posted 2 February 2007 @ 5pm | Tagged thoughts

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I don’t know why I didn’t run into this hidden gem before. There’s a plugin called RAV which generates a graph image of your rails models and controllers structure using graphviz, and it’s really easy to use! Just follow these steps:

# install the plugin
script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rav/

#install graphviz, for ox you do:

http://www.pixelglow.com/graphviz/download/

ln -s /Applications/Graphviz.app/Contents/MacOS/dot /usr/local/bin/dot

#in your rails root:
rake visualize

You’ll get a generated image (there are options to do any output format that graphviz supports but the default is png) in doc/diagram.png. Enjoy!