How to create beautiful architectural diagrams with Python? (~7min)

advanced settings

Now that we know how to use diagrams, clusters, edges and nodes, let's look at customization. There are two customizable objects: nodes and edges.

Customizing Edges

Let's first look at how to customize the edges. There are 3 customization parameters: color, style and label. The default color is gray, but if you want to set another color, the colors are those used by the matplotlib package which you can find here</a>.

Then, it is possible to play on the style and there are 4 available:

• • The default style which is a continuous line
  • Bold, one solid line in bold
  • Dashed, the line is made of dashes
  • Dotted, the line is made of dots

It is not possible to combine different styles, ie have a line made of bold dashes.

Finally, it is possible to add a label to an Edge if you wish to explain what this Edge represents.

Let's see what this looks like in code.

    from diagrams import Diagram, Cluster, Edge
    from diagrams.aws.analytics import Glue, Quicksight
    from diagrams.aws.database import RDS
    from diagrams.aws.management import Cloudwatch
    from diagrams.aws.storage import S3
    
    def arrow(color='black', style='line', label=None):    
        """ Function to define the edge between the part of the diagram :param color: the color of the edge, could be any color :type color: str :param style: the style of the edge, could be dashed, dotted, bold or line (default) :type style: str :param label: the text you want to show on the edge :type label: str :return: Edge object with the different parameters we set up :type: Edge() """    
        return Edge(color=color, style=style, label=label)
        
    with Diagram('Pipeline - Global Overview', filename='Diagramm/Pipeline_GO', show=True, direction="LR"):    
        with Cluster('RDS'): db = RDS('PostgreSQL BDD\n stored in RDS')    
            
        with Cluster('AWS Glue (ETL)'): jobs = Glue('Data Engineering (Filter, join, rename..)')    
            
        with Cluster('Cloudwatch'): log = Cloudwatch('Monitoring Scripts')    
            
        with Cluster('S3'): bucket = S3('S3 Buckets\n to store\n AWS Glue outputs')    
            
        with Cluster('Quicksight'): dashboard = Quicksight('Dashboard\n for monitoring') db_mycharlotte >> arrow(color='red', style='bold') >> jobs >> arrow(color='red', style ='bold') >> \ bucket >> arrow(color='red', style='bold') >> dashboard jobs >> arrow(color='hotpink', style='dashed') >> log

Here I created a function, arrow(), which by default produces a bold black arrow, which I prefer over the package default arrow. I then use this function to define the different arrows that I want to have in my graph. When you want to personalize an Edge, you must explicitly mark it in the diagram diagram between the two nodes concerned. Here I wanted the Edges of the pipeline to be red and bold, except the arrow for the logs which is pink and dotted. We can see this in the last two lines of the code.