Have you ever wanted to visually represent your Rails schema in a way that is clear and shows the various relationships between models? I’ve been asked for a visual representation of our schema several times now by various departments here at CoachUp.
After creating the diagram, we actually found that it was extremely helpful to all members on the dev team (especially new members whom we were on-boarding)
I figured this would be a great quick blog post in the event that anyone else out there needs to do the same thing. Here are the steps I took to produce a quality diagram of our Rails model data using the Railroady Gem:
https://github.com/preston/
brew install graphviz
group :development, :test do
gem 'railroady'
end
bundle install
railroady -o models.dot -M
dot -Tpng models.dot > models.png
Below is the simplified model diagram that railroady produced:
Have you used other tools / techniques to visualize your schema? Would love to hear what others have done in the comments.