Generating UML diagrams from textual representation

Question

How can I generate a UML sequence diagram from a file containing a textual representation of my process, with command-line tools in Linux?

Answer 1

Although PlantUML is listed in the accepted answer (among many other tools) it merits more attention.

In addition to being easily wrapped into a command line tool, PlantUML also has

1. excellent documentation (check out the docs for sequence diagrams)
2. simple and powerful syntax (may compare favorably with UMLGraph)
3. styleable output
4. extensive tool integration (Emacs, Sphinx)

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However PlantUML comes as a java archive so the following setup may be required:

1. java
2. graphviz (not required for sequence diagrams)
3. a bash wrapper

java and graphviz are available as packages for the major linux distros. PlantUML itself is available for Fedora and Ubuntu.

If your distribution does not provide a package, download a jar file from the main site and wrap as a bash script.

A bash wrapper (as follows) can be stored in a file named plantuml on your path i.e. one of the directories listed by echo $PATH. Don't forget to make it executable with chmod u+x plantuml.

#!/bin/bash
# from the vim syntax plugin README at aklt/plantuml-syntax on github
java -jar $HOME/path/to/plantuml.jar -tsvg $@

Then run plantuml apple.uml berry.uml and plantuml will create apple.svg berry.svg.

Answer 2

There are many (many=more than 10) tools for this.
See a complete list.

Answer 3

Not sure if it's what you want, but UMLGraph can generate sequence diagrams using graphviz and ghostscript...