Generating an ERD (Entity Relationship Diagram) can be helpful to understand what your database looks like, and is also really easy to generate if you’re running a Python/Django Application.
Step 1: Install django-extensions and graphviz
pip install django-extensions && pip install graphviz
Step 2: Add django_extensions to settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = [
...
'django_extensions',
...
]
Step 3: Create the .dot output and convert to .png
Run manage.py graph_models from the environment you may normally use:
python manage.py graph_models -a > output.dot
From your mac, change the format to png using graphviz
brew install graphviz dot -Tpng output.dot -o output.png
Note You can also output to pdf by changing the type:
dot -Tpdf output.dot -o output.pdf
References
Django Extensions graph_models docs
Django Extensions Commands Unavailable?
Opening .dot files on mac
Thanks for this post, your How-To worked perfectly and helped us a lot. My first idea was to generate the ERD from the database, but we couldn’t access it with tools like DBeaver. It was a new and exciting experience to generate it from Django.
The landscape photo on top is distractingly beautiful.
Very helpful. Just converted my raw model schema to an png image within a minute . Thanks .