Graphviz Installation

Graphviz Installation

The easiest way to install Graphviz (which contains dot, the program we will use to generate the graph images) is through a package manager called Chocolatey

The installation instructions for Chocolatey are located here, but I will include them here as well.

To install, run the following command in Powershell running as administrator

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

Otherwise, run the following command to install Graphviz:

choco install graphviz

and, optionally, run the following command to make sure dot is working properly:

dot -V

You should get a version number output similar to below:

dot - graphviz version 2.38.0 (20140413.2041)

I would also recommend running dot --help to familiarize yourself with some of it's options.

Generating Images from dot graphs

The following command works well for generating an image from a dot graph file:

dot -Tpng -o graph.png <dot file name>