Structurizr

Structurizr is a collection of tooling to visualise, document and explore your software architecture.

Structurizr for Java Structurizr for .NET

Software architecture diagrams as code

Structurizr is an implementation of the System Context, Container and Component diagrams from Simon Brown's C4 model, supplemented with a dynamic diagram that takes its influence from UML. Structurizr does not provide a "drag and drop" editor to create diagrams. Instead, you create a software architecture model using code and upload it via the web API. Here's a simple example using Java:

Workspace workspace = new Workspace("My model", "This is a model of my software system.");
Model model = workspace.getModel();

Person user = model.addPerson("User", "A user of my software system.");
SoftwareSystem softwareSystem = model.addSoftwareSystem("Software System", "My software system.");
user.uses(softwareSystem, "Uses");

ViewSet viewSet = workspace.getViews();
SystemContextView contextView = viewSet.createSystemContextView(softwareSystem, "context", "A simple example of a System Context diagram.");
contextView.addAllSoftwareSystems();
contextView.addAllPeople();

Styles styles = viewSet.getConfiguration().getStyles();
styles.addElementStyle(Tags.SOFTWARE_SYSTEM).background("#1168bd").color("#ffffff");
styles.addElementStyle(Tags.PERSON).background("#08427b").color("#ffffff").shape(Shape.Person);

StructurizrClient structurizrClient = new StructurizrClient("key", "secret");
structurizrClient.putWorkspace(25441, workspace);

And here's the resulting diagram when you open it in Structurizr, where the layout of the diagrams can be modified.

A diagram key is automatically generated for you, based upon the styles defined in the model.

In essence, Structurizr is an implementation of an executable architecture description language, a simple domain-specific language to describe static structure, using code. There are open source client libraries on GitHub for Java and the .NET platform, which include static analysis features to help you extract components from your codebase. If you integrate this with your continuous integration/build process, your diagrams stay up to date. See Why use code to create a software architecture model? for more information.

Software documentation as Markdown or AsciiDoc

The code doesn't tell the whole story, so in addition to static and dynamic diagrams, Structurizr also provides support for lightweight supplementary technical documentation based upon the "software guidebook" from Simon Brown's Software Architecture for Developers: Volume 2 book or other templates such as arc42.

The documentation is a collection of Markdown or AsciiDoc documents, one per section, which are rendered in the web browser. This content is uploaded in a workspace along with the software architecture model, which makes it easy to embed diagrams from that workspace.

Explore your software architecture model

Once you have a model of your software system, extracted from your code using static analysis techniques, you can additionally visualise the model in a number of different ways. Structurizr provides some explorations to help you explore the elements and their relationships in the model.

Far too many teams allow their codebases to grow without having an insight into the structure of the code. The result is often the proverbial "big ball of mud"; a codebase that is tangled, hard to understand, hard to work with and hard to change. Visualising the structure of your code is the first step towards improving it.

Structurizr vs other tools

Structurizr combines the power and richness of a model, with the ease of use we get from text-based tools such as PlantUML and WebSequenceDiagrams. Read more...

Structurizr is available as both a software as a service (cloud) and an on-premises installation.