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Graphviz

A graph visualisation toolkit.

Graphviz takes a description of a graph in the DOT language — a small declarative grammar for nodes, edges, and attributes — and renders it as PostScript, PDF, SVG, PNG, or one of dozens of other formats. Several layout engines (dot for hierarchical layouts, neato and fdp for force-directed, circo for circular, twopi for radial) cover most graph-drawing needs.

The project began at AT&T Bell Labs in the 1990s and the source is now hosted at gitlab.com/graphviz under an EPL-1.0 licence. The DOT language itself is one of the more enduring small DSLs in computing — over thirty years old at this point and still the lingua franca for "describe a graph in plain text" tasks.

Graphviz is the engine behind many code-visualisation tools (call graphs, dependency graphs in build systems), academic diagram production, and tools like Doxygen's class diagrams, GitLab's pipeline visualisations, and many others. It pairs with PlantUML and Mermaid as part of the broader text-based diagramming ecosystem.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install graphviz
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install graphviz
Arch:          sudo pacman -S graphviz
macOS:         brew install graphviz