This extension allows you to embed Mermaid graphs in your documents, including general flowcharts, sequence and gantt diagrams.

It adds a directive to embed mermaid markup. For example:

.. mermaid::

   sequenceDiagram
      participant Alice
      participant Bob
      Alice->John: Hello John, how are you?
      loop Healthcheck
          John->John: Fight against hypochondria
      end
      Note right of John: Rational thoughts <br/>prevail...
      John-->Alice: Great!
      John->Bob: How about you?
      Bob-->John: Jolly good!

By default, the HTML builder will simply render this as a div tag with class="mermaid", injecting the external javascript, css and initialization code to make mermaid works.

For other builders (or if mermaid_output_format config variable is set differently), the extension will use mermaid-cli to render as to a PNG or SVG image, and then used in the proper code.

.. mermaid::

   sequenceDiagram
      participant Alice
      participant Bob
      Alice->John: Hello John, how are you?
      loop Healthcheck
          John->John: Fight against hypochondria
      end
      Note right of John: Rational thoughts <br/>prevail...
      John-->Alice: Great!
      John->Bob: How about you?
      Bob-->John: Jolly good!

You can also embed external mermaid files, by giving the file name as an argument to the directive and no additional content:

.. mermaid:: path/to/mermaid-gantt-code.mmd

As for all file references in Sphinx, if the filename is not absolute, it is taken as relative to the source directory.

In addition, you can use mermaid to automatically generate a diagram to show the inheritance of classes for a given module using the directive autoclasstree. This receive the module, and optionally the relative namespace. Obviously, the module need to be importable to be represented.

For example:

.. autoclasstree:: sphinx.util sphinx

.. autoclasstree:: sphinx.util sphinx

Installation

You can install it using pip

pip install sphinxcontrib-mermaid

Then add sphinxcontrib.mermaid in extensions list of your projec't conf.py:

extensions = [
    ...,
    'sphinxcontrib.mermaid'
]

Directive options

:alt:: determines the image's alternate text for HTML output. If not given, the alternate text defaults to the mermaid code.

:align:: determines the image's position. Valid options are 'left', 'center', 'right'

:caption:: can be used to give a caption to the diagram.

Config values

mermaid_output_format

The output format for Mermaid when building HTML files. This must be either 'raw' 'png' or 'svg'; the default is 'raw'. mermaid-cli is required if it's not raw

mermaid_version

The version of mermaid that will be used to parse raw output in HTML files. This should match a version available on https://unpkg.com/browse/mermaid/. Currently, the default version is 8.4.8.

mermaid_cmd

The command name with which to invoke mermaid-cli program. The default is 'mmdc'; you may need to set this to a full path if it's not in the executable search path.

mermaid_params

For individual parameters, a list of parameters can be added. Refer to https://github.com/mermaidjs/mermaid.cli#options. Examples:

mermaid_params = ['--theme', 'forest', '--width', '600', '--backgroundColor', 'transparent']

This will render the mermaid diagram with theme forest, 600px width and transparent background.

mermaid_sequence_config

Allows overriding the sequence diagram configuration. It could be useful to increase the width between actors. It needs to be a json file Check options in the documentation

mermaid_verbose

Use the verbose mode when call mermaid-cli, and show its output in the building process.

mermaid_pdfcrop

If using latex output, it might be useful to crop the pdf just to the needed space. For this, pdfcrop can be used. State binary name to use this extra function.

Acknowledge

Much of the code is based on sphinx.ext.graphviz. Thanks to its authors and other Sphinx contributors for such amazing tool.