What's the best way to generate a UML diagram from Python source code? [closed]

Question

A colleague is looking to generate UML class diagrams from heaps of Python source code. He's primarily interested in the inheritance relationships, and mildly interested in compositional relationships, and doesn't care much about class attributes that are just Python primitives.

The source code is pretty straightforward and not tremendously evil--it doesn't do any fancy metaclass magic, for example. (It's mostly from the days of Python 1.5.2, with some sprinklings of "modern" 2.3ish stuff.)

What's the best existing solution to recommend?

Answer 1

You may have heard of Pylint that helps statically checking Python code. Few people know that it comes with a tool named Pyreverse that draws UML diagrams from the Python code it reads. Pyreverse uses Graphviz as a backend.

It is used like this:

pyreverse -o png -p yourpackage . 

where the . can also be a single file.

Answer 2

Epydoc is a tool to generate API documentation from Python source code. It also generates UML class diagrams, using Graphviz in fancy ways. Here is an example of diagram generated from the source code of Epydoc itself.

Because Epydoc performs both object introspection and source parsing it can gather more informations respect to static code analysers such as Doxygen: it can inspect a fair amount of dynamically generated classes and functions, but can also use comments or unassigned strings as a documentation source, e.g. for variables and class public attributes.