Month: September 2020

C4 Diagrams using PlantUML and VSCode (on Windows 10)

I was doing my daily scan of Twitter the other day and came across this https://twitter.com/DinisCruz/status/1304389504661434369

One of the commenters questioned how it was implemented, and there were a few follow up comments.  Below are my steps for getting started

  1. Install Chocolatey (if not already installed) Open a command prompt, in adminstrator mode Type:
    @”%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe” -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command “iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(‘https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1′))” && SET “PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin”

2. Install PlantUML
choco install plantuml

3. Install VS-Code
choco install vscode

4. Download the file from https://github.com/RicardoNiepel/C4-PlantUML/blob/master/.vscode/C4.code-snippets and save it to the folder %APPDATA%\Code\User\Snippets
This will allow you to use C4 snippets from any project.
If you only want to use the snippets from a single project, store the file in a .vscode folder in your project

5. Add the PlantUML extension (still at the command line)
code –install-extension jebbs.plantuml

6. Open VS-Code

7. Create a sample puml file

@startuml Basic Sample
!includeurl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RicardoNiepel/C4–PlantUML/release/1-0/C4_Container.puml
Person(admin, “Administrator”)
System_Boundary(c1, “Sample System”) {
    Container(web_app, “Web Application”, “C#, ASP.NET Core 2.1 MVC”, “Allows users to compare multiple Twitter timelines”)
}
System(twitter, “Twitter2”)
Rel(admin, web_app, “Uses”, “HTTPS”)
Rel(web_app, twitter, “Gets tweets from”, “HTTPS”)
@enduml

8. Click Alt-D to open the preview

I hope this helps someone get started. This was my first real foray into VS-Code.  It won’t be my last.