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OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

https://github.com/stan-smith/OpenFLOW
120•x0z•7h ago

Comments

x0z•7h ago
I've not done anything special here, just wrapped the community edition of ISOFLOW https://github.com/markmanx/isoflow and made it dead easy to set up and run. You can now export and load JSON backups of your diagrams allowing you to essentially have as many as you want, which the community version of ISOFLOW restricts. Enjoy!
lovelearning•7m ago
I'm not very familiar with Node.js. Any idea where in isoflow's code are the graphics for those 3D-style icons? Are they SVG or what? Is it possible to add custom icons?
martypitt•5h ago
Diagrams look great - well done.

Reminds me of a similar project years ago that was doing the same thing - they ultimately struggled with monetization and folded (I forget the name) -- however this one is MIT OSS, so I'm guessing that's not a key concern right now.

Note that your "Built with the Isoflow library" link at the bottom to isoflow 404's to https://github.com/isoflow/isoflow

x0z•5h ago
Thanks! I can't take any credit at all for the icons/design that's all Isoflow, but their community edition is designed to steer you to the pro version.

No plans at all for money making, just want people to enjoy using it.

Thank you for pointing out the link, I'll get on that ;)

busssard•58m ago
it would be great to have an easier time to add my custom icon svg or even links to svg and then scaling them automatically to size

this way i could tell the LLM that will be generating my JSON to include the following links as X and create the output JSON immediately

Animux•4h ago
If this could be hosted on GH pages, is there any demo link?
x0z•4h ago
https://codesandbox.io/p/sandbox/github/markmanx/isoflow

^ ISOFLOW have an online demo you can use :)

zero0529•3h ago
Can you export to other formats than JSON?
x0z•2h ago
Which formats would you like to see?
typeofhuman•2h ago
Not OC but I'd like iage (png/jpg)
9dev•2h ago
This is a little tangential, but I've wondered for a while if there's a better way to visualise the composition of software systems.

Often, there's not only a single way to look at one: There's a user interaction flow through components, but those components also consist of hardware; the hardware might be virtual and composed of several, spread, sub-components, or even containers. You can go down this path pretty deep, and arrive at several different representations of the system that are either impossible to visualise at the same time, or make it incomprehensible.

Ideally, I would want to have a way to document different facets of the system individually, but linked to each other, and be able to change my perspective at anytime. This would allow to flip between UX, network traffic, firewall boundaries, program flow, logical RPC flow, and so on; all while being able to view connected components for a given component at anytime. For example, inspecting an application, then viewing its network ports, then its runtime container, the hypervisor the container runs on, the cloud provider that sits in, and so on.

My idea so far is a graph database that contains all components and the edges between them. The tool would have to be as extensible as possible, so using something like HCL to describe the graph would be great, with extensions for all kinds of components and edges. And finally a viewer to render visual representations of one or more composable layers to flick through, and export etc.

I never got around to working on it yet, but if anyone else had the same idea, I'd be open to collaborating :)

alixanderwang•2h ago
At least for the layering + using text aspect, D2 support this:

defining diagrams as multiple layers like so

  x -> y

  layers: {
    inside_x: {
      a -> b
    }
  }
A fleshed out example hosted on our web service: https://app.terrastruct.com/diagrams/664641071
aitchnyu•55m ago
Wonder why Mermaid has more hype than this.
nullify88•48m ago
Whoa as an infrastructure guy I had always dreamed of diagrams like this. And while I've used Miro and some OSS homebrew stuff, nothing was as polished as this. Well done.
9dev•31m ago
Terrastruct looks really nice, and kind of like a 2D version of the 3D thing I'm thinking of; if you could attach key-value properties to nodes and vertices, and had different rendering modes that made use of any of these properties to render the item differently, that would probably be pretty close. For example, a layer that displays a physical network might only consider vertices with a `kind` attribute of "physical link"; that limits the layer to all nodes with a matching vertex between them, and the layer would also only display those attributes of the nodes relevant for the current view.

Does that make sense?

alixanderwang•26m ago
Yeah we do this with globs.

  a.class: backend
  b.class: frontend

  # hide everything
  **: suspend

  layers: {
     backend: {
       # show backend stuff
       **: unsuspend {
         &class: backend
       }
     }
  }

see more here: https://d2lang.com/blog/c4/
billyp-rva•2h ago
There are quite a few tools that offer this model-based approach; you define your resources in a model, then use them in multiple perspectives to show different aspects like you describe. Some, like Ilograph[0] (my project), offer interactivity and zooming.

[0] https://www.ilograph.com

x0z•2h ago
Some very good points, I totally agree, I suppose as you said you get to a point in your abstraction where it either loses meaning or becomes too complex to view. I think it would be a fantastic thing to try! Go build it!
pjbk•2h ago
I always loved the isometric diagrams on Clive Maxfield's [1] books about electronics. Since a lot of circuits are non-planar (flip flops, semiconductor layers, FPGA architecture), adding a perspective view makes things uncluttered, and easier to understand and remember. I think it translates well to many technologies.

[1] https://www.clivemaxfield.com

progx•2h ago
Node version? Could not get it running with 22 or 24 on linux.
pelagicAustral•1h ago
Got it working with no issues on v20.11.0
x0z•1h ago
Good to know! Thanks :)
x0z•1h ago
24.3 for me, whats the issue you're getting?
BigJ1211•1h ago
Works on 24.3.0 for me, though many a warning is thrown.
mmastrac•1h ago
This is awesome. I built a lightweight home status server called Stylus that would probably pair very well with this:

https://github.com/mmastrac/stylus

It works by automatically changing CSS classes, and it looks like the underlying isoflow library should support this.

h1fra•1h ago
NB: it's using isoflow
dr_kretyn•34m ago
"beautiful" here is definitely subjective. I only see a diagram and it looks like from PowerPoint presentation from the marketing team to the sales team.

Why JS world frequently uses "beautiful" or "modern" to describe its project? Often that hides something else.

swalsh•21m ago
You can just not post if your criticism is mean spirited.
donatj•14m ago
I am unclear exactly, what is this doing on top of Isoflow? Seems like Isoflow is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here?
gtirloni•12m ago
This looks amazing. I find Mermaid.js ugly and the syntax difficult/buggy but unfortunately it's one of the best supported diagram tools in static site generators. It'd be awesome to have Isoflow diagrams embedded in Markdown like that.
cybrox•5m ago
I love the idea of mermaid but the syntax is somewhat convolutes and the integrations in tools like GitLab are very unstable.
x0z•4m ago
Thanks! That'd definitely be interesting to look into, I'll put it on my TODO
Yesman85•3m ago
If it can consume terraform state and visualize it, that would be amazing.

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