PlantUML is used to draw UML diagrams, using a simple and human readable text description.
Be careful, because it does not prevent you from drawing inconsistent diagrams (such as having two classes inheriting from each other, for example). So it’s more a drawing tool than a modeling tool.

There are several reasons why PlantUML might be a good choice for creating diagrams:

Overall, PlantUML is a powerful and versatile tool for creating professional-looking diagrams quickly and easily. It is particularly well-suited for users who prefer a simple, text-based approach to creating diagrams, and who want a tool that can automatically handle the layout and appearance of their diagrams.

You can use link::theme[themes] with PlantUML to customize the appearance of your diagrams. PlantUML provides several built-in themes that you can use, and you can also create your own custom themes by defining link::style-evolution[your own colors and styles].

PlantUML takes care of a lot of the layout work for you, so you can focus on expressing the relationships and structure of your diagram. It uses intelligent layout algorithms to arrange the elements of your diagram in a clear and easy-to-understand way, saving you the time and effort of manually positioning and aligning individual elements. This makes it a great tool for quickly creating professional-looking diagrams without a lot of manual effort.

PlantUML is a generator, which means that it automatically creates diagrams based on the text you provide. This is different from some other diagramming tools, which allow you to manually position and arrange individual elements in your diagram.

The main advantage of this approach is that it allows you to create diagrams quickly and easily, without having to worry about the specific placement of individual elements. It also makes it easier to update your diagrams, since you can simply modify the text that represents your diagram, and PlantUML will automatically update the diagram to reflect your changes.

One potential disadvantage of using a generator like PlantUML is that you may not have as much control over the exact layout of your diagram as you would with a tool that allows you to position elements manually. However, for many users, the time and effort saved by using a generator more than makes up for this limitation.

Additionally, the PlantUML community forum is a great resource for finding solutions to common layout problems and sharing tips and tricks for customizing the appearance of your diagrams.

Links to png or svg generated by PlantUML Server are valid forever (that is as long as the server is up).
However, we do not store any diagrams on our servers.

This may sound contradictory. It is not: the whole diagram is link::text-encoding[compressed into the URL itself]. When the server receives the URL, it decompresses the URL to retrieve the diagram text and generates the image. There is no need to store anything. Even if the server is down, you can retrieve the diagram using the flag -decodeurl with the link::command-line[command line]. Furthermore, the diagram data is stored in PNG metadata, so you can fetch it even from a downloaded image.

Occasionally we may activate HTTP traces on our server. This is mainly for performance issues (when we have some) to understand the traffic we get. Once the issue solved, we turn back off HTTP traces and we remove the logs.

Concerning sensitive content: even if we do not store the generated diagrams, please be aware that all traffic goes through HTTP, so it’s easy to catch.

So you should probably install link::server[a local server] on your own network if you plan to generate diagrams with sensitive information. You can do this with no Java/J2EE knowledge since there is link::picoweb[a tiny web server] included in PlantUML.jar.

PlantUML has been installed on various systems, and some users have reported minor issues when installing it.
You can have a look link::faq-install[on this page] which give advises if something is wrong.

You have more information about Graphviz link::graphviz-dot[about Graphviz here].

The following version have been tested, and are known to work:

Note that versions 2.39 to 2.42 do not work very well with PlantUML.

With version 2.44, under Windows, you may have to run dot -c in a command line to finalize the installation, like in the following example:

You may have to run dot -c with Administrator Right.

Another option is to install Win32 version of GraphViz 2.44 which does not require this post-install process.

If you compile Graphviz by yourself, you have to build it with libexpat in order to work with PlantUML.

Google Trends are somehow positive. And there are few books that mention PlantUML. So yes, it’s mature.

Note that PlantUML is developed with continuous integration in mind. That means that there are new releases quite often, with (hopefully!) backward compatibility. So the file PlantUML.jar may changed over time, while keeping the same name.

If you want to know the exact version you are using, you can type in the command line:

or use the following small special diagram description:

To check if a newer version is available for download, you can go to link::download[the download page].

You can also subscribe to the following rss flows:

Or you can use the command line:

Or use the following small special diagram description:

PlantUML limits image width and height to 4096. There is an environment variable that you can set to override this limit: PLANTUML_LIMIT_SIZE. You have to define this variable before launching PlantUML, something like:

or

Another way is an option in the command line:

Note that if you generate very big diagrams, (for example, something like 20 000 x 10 000 pixels), you can have some memory issues. The solution is to add this parameter to the java vm : -Xmx1024m.

Characters encoding is a subtle thing…​ By default, PlantUML use the default charset of your platform, which may or may not be UTF-8 . If you want to know which charset you are using, you can type the following command:

If you want to use a different charset, for example UTF-8, you can use the -charset flag :

You can also find link::unicode[here information about unicode] . Note that even if Java does not support B.O.M. (Byte Order Mark) in UTF-8 format file, a workaround has been put into PlantUML, so this should not be an issue.

Some Japanese users reported that they have to set the LANG variable to ja_JP.UTF-8 in their shell before launching PlantUML.

Since link::svek[the new architecture], it should simply work, because Java knows how to draw East Asian characters.

You can use the -teps flag in the command line, or format="eps" in link::ant[the ANT task].

Work is link::xmi[in progress].

Short answer: You do have to use @startuml (or @startditaa/@startjcckit…​) when starting a diagram.

Long answer:

The @startuml/@startditaa/@startjcckit is useful to determine the type of diagram (uml, ditaa, jcckit…​), and because you can optionally put a filename after the @startXYZ. This also allows to have several diagrams inside the same file.

Earlier versions of PlantUML were not supporting ditaa or jcckit. When you use link::command-line#pipe[-pipe] flag, since the diagram is generated to standard output, there could be only one diagram in the standard input. And there is no need to specify a filename. For all those reasons, @startuml was not needed when using link::command-line#pipe[-pipe] flag at that time.

Later, it has been decided to normalize this, and to impose @startXYZ everywhere, even with link::command-line#pipe[-pipe] flag, because it was confusing for users. Unfortunately, since some existing scripts were already using the fact that @startuml is not needed in link::command-line#pipe[-pipe] flag, it has been decided to keep this as a deprecated option, just to allow older scripts to run. We indeed do pay attention of ascending compatibility.

For newer scripts, you should not rely on this, and use @startXYZ/@endXYZ with the link::command-line#pipe[-pipe] flag.

PlantUML is distributed under the GPL license.
You can print the license using the command line option:

Or you can use the special diagram:

You can also use:

Those versions miss few features (link::ditaa[DITAA] for example), but are 100% able to generate UML diagrams.

You can print the license of these versions using the command line option:

Or you can use the special diagram:

No, they are not.

Images (whatever their format : PNG, SVG…​) generated by the execution of PlantUML are owned by the author of their corresponding sources code (that is, their textual description in PlantUML language).

Images generated by the execution of PlantUML are not considered as covered work. You can do whatever you want with them.

The generated images can then be used without any reference to the GPL/LGPL/ASL/EPL/MIT license. It is not even necessary to stipulate that they have been generated with PlantUML, although this will be appreciated by PlantUML team.

There is an exception : if the textual description in PlantUML language is also covered by some license (like the GPL/LGPL/ASL/EPL/MIT), then the generated images are logically covered by this license.

As long as you do not modify the Java source code and the jar file, you can integrate PlantUML.jar in your own closed source software.

The only constraint is that you have to mention somewhere in your own license or in your documentation that you are using PlantUML and that PlantUML is distributed under LGPL.

You can then even sell your software and earn money, without any other constraints (although link::donors[donation will be appreciate] in that case :-)

There are no license for the PlantUML syntax itself : this means that everybody can use it.

So you can use PlantUML comments into your own code : those comments are owned by yourself, and are not considered as covered work, and are not covered by the GPL/LGPL/APL/EPL/MIT license.

Only the current implementation (that is, PlantUML program) is licensed under GPL, LGPL, ASL, EPL or MIT. On the other hand note that the documentation (examples, notices, …​) published in the PlantUML website is copyrighted. But you can still write your own documentation.

PlantUML is using link::graphviz-dot[Graphviz] to generate some diagrams. So PlantUML is launching dot program and retrieve the information generated by dot as a SVG flow.

This message means that PlantUML is getting an empty flow from dot execution, and therefore cannot generate UML diagrams. There may be several reasons why this happens:

If you have the error message java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class net.sourceforge.plantuml.ugraphic.UFont, it probably means that there are no fonts installed on your server.

You can solve it by adding fontconfig on your system:

You may also need to install

If you are running PlantUML on a linux server without graphical capability, you may have some error message:

Basically, this is because PlantUML needs to have access to some graphical resources (more information here). You can turn PlantUML to headless mode, using the flag -Djava.awt.headless=true. For example:

Under Mac OS X, if you have some error message like:

You need to follow the instructions on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25914757/osx-yosemite-jvm-shared-library-does-not-contain-the-jni-createjavavm-symbol:

This seems to work only under Java 6, so you may define the following alias to be used in your scripts.

Depending on your configuration, you can try the flag -Djava.awt.headless=true.
For example:

There is a -cypher option the command line that generates a .preproc file instead of regular image file.

The .preproc generated file looks like the input diagram expect that all words (except PlantUML language keywords) have been replaced by a random set of letters.

You can double check this by running several time the -cypher option (you will get a different text each time). You may also look at the Cypher.java class used to execute this transformation to be sure that there are no backdoor there to retrieve back your original diagram.

If there is an issue in your original diagram, the same issue is likely to also occur with the cyphered one. Since the cyphered text is really meaningless, you can safely share it with us : there will be no way for us to guess what you are really working on.

But we will be able to reproduce the issue and fix it so that you can have your original (and confidential) diagram working.

If you have the following error message :

The currently displayed page contains invalid values

when displaying the Windows/Preferences/PlantUML, you should try to quit link::eclipse[Eclipse] and use the -clean flag on the command line:

You can use the forum facility.

Someone will try to answer your question there.