Contents

= Rails ERD - Generate Entity-Relationship Diagrams for Rails applications

Rails ERD is a Rails plugin that allows you to easily generate diagrams based
on your ActiveRecord models. The diagrams give a great overview of how your
models are related. Having a diagram that describes your models is perfect
documentation for your application.

Rails ERD was created specifically for Rails 3. It uses ActiveRecord reflection
to figure out how your models are associated.

== Getting started

In its most simple form, Rails ERD is a plugin for Rails 3 that provides you
with a Rake task to create an Entity-Relationship Diagram. It depends on the
Graphviz visualisation library. You have to install Graphviz before using
Rails ERD. In order to create PDF files (the default), you should install
or compile Graphviz with Pango/Cairo.

For example, to install Graphviz with MacPorts:

  % sudo port install graphviz

Or with Homebrew:

  % brew install cairo pango graphviz

Next, install Rails ERD. Open your +Gemfile+, and add the following:

  group :development do
    gem 'rails-erd'
  end

Tell Bundler to install Rails ERD:

  % bundle install

You now have access to Rails ERD through Rake. Generate a new
Entity-Relationship Diagram for your Rails application:

  % rake erd

All done! You will now have a file named +ERD.pdf+ in your application root.

== Advanced use

Rails ERD has several options that you can use to customise its behaviour.
All options can be provided on the command line. For example:

  % rake erd exclude_timestamps=false

For an overview of all available options, see the documentation of RailsERD:
http://rails-erd.rubyforge.org/doc/

== License

Rails ERD is released under the MIT license.

Version data entries

1 entries across 1 versions & 1 rubygems

Version	Path
rails-erd-0.1.0	README.rdoc