CakePHP GraphViz Relations

This is a CakePHP shell that will find all models in your CakePHP application and plugins, figure out the relationships between them, and will build a nice graph, visualzing those relationships for you.

It supports CakePHP 2.x, and requires PHP 5.3.3 or greater. But there are numerous ways it can fail to work for you. If it does fail, please let me know and I'll try to fix it.

Intallation via Composer

require: {
	"mamchenkov/cakephp-graphviz-models": "dev-master"
}

Load plugin in app/Config/bootstrap.php

CakePlugin::load('GraphVizRelations');

Requirements

Since version 2.1 (Angry Blue Octopus On Steroids), this script relies on phpDocumentor/Graphviz package, rather than directly on the command-line dot tool. But you will need to install the Graphviz command line tool incl. dot.

Usage

The simplest way to use this shell is just to run it via CakePHP console:

$ Console/cake GraphVizRelations.graph

This should generate a graph.png image in your current directory. Please have a look.

If you need more control, there are two options that this shell understand from the command line: filename and format. You can use either the filename option like so:

$ Console/cake GraphVizRelations.graph /tmp/my_models.png

Or you can use both options together like so:

$ Console/cake GraphVizRelations.graph /tmp/my_models.svg svg

No special magic is done about the filename. What You Give Is What You Get. As for the format, you can use anything that GraphViz supports and understands.

If you are still looking for more control, have a look inside the script. There are plenty of settings, options, parameters, and comments for you to make sense of it all. It might be helpful to get familiar with GraphViz Dot Language, just to feel a tiny bit more confident.

Enjoy!