Jekyll Plantastisch

"Ein fantastischer PlantUML plugin!"

jekyll-plantastisch is a PlantUML Jekyll plugin with several distinguishable features:

• It uses <object> html tag instead of <img> tag, when embedding rendered diagrams on page.

  This allows you to use interactive SVG diagrams with links (see PlantUML docs on this).

• It requires you to put @startuml and @enduml tags into the source of your diagram instead of forcibly inserting them.

  This was an issue with jekyll-plantuml plugin, because it automatically adds these keywords to any content wrapped in a {% plantuml %} tag.

  Not having this enables you to store the diagram's source in a completely separate file in _includes directory and reuse it in several places, while simply embedding it, when required.

Example	Output
{% plantuml %} @startuml class "[[https://www.nypl.org/ Foo]]" as foo note left of foo Here is a mouse This is [[https://github.com link]] end note @enduml
{% plantuml %} {% include diagram.uml %} {% endplantuml %}

WARNING: this plugin is not compatible with Github Pages, because it's a custom plugin and it is not included into the default github-pages bundle. If you want to use this plugin with GitHub Pages you will need to generate the _site directory locally and push its contents to GitHub rather than pushing website sources to GitHub to have it build and render them for you.

Add this line to your Gemfile to the group :jekyll_plugins do section.

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem "jekyll-plantastisch"
end

Add plugin to the _config.yml

plugins:
  - jekyll-plantastisch

Run bundle install or bundle update

bundle install

Install it first:

gem install jekyll-plantastisch

With Jekyll 2, simply add the gem to your _config.yml gems list:

gems: ['jekyll-plantastisch', ... your other plugins]

Or for previous versions, create a plugin file within your Jekyll project's _plugins directory:

# _plugins/plantuml-plugin.rb
require "jekyll-plantastisch"

Then, make sure PlantUML is installed on your build machine, and can be executed with a simple plantuml command.

For Linux user, you could create a /usr/bin/plantuml with contents:

#!/bin/bash

java -jar /home/user/Downloads/plantuml.jar "$1" "$2"

Remember to change the path to plantuml.jar file.

Then set executable permission.

chmod +x /usr/bin/plantuml

Now, it's time to create a diagram, in your Jekyll blog page:

{% plantuml %}
@startuml
[First] - [Second]
@enduml
{% endplantuml %}