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

python uml diagram
Mike Pirnat picture Mike Pirnat · Nov 3, 2008 · Viewed 211.5k times · Source

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

Nicolas Chauvat picture Nicolas Chauvat · Sep 26, 2011

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.

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