PostgreSQL Autodoc

This is a utility which will run through PostgreSQL system tables and returns HTML, DOT, and several styles of XML which describe the database.

As a result, documentation about a project can be generated quickly and be automatically updatable, yet have a quite professional look if you do some DSSSL/CSS work.

Requirements

• PostgreSQL 7.4 or later

• python3 with the following packages:

  • psycopg2
  • Mako

Usage

postgresql_autodoc.py [-h] [-d <dbname>] [-f <file>] [--host <host>]
                      [-p <port>] [-u <username>] [--password <pw>]
                      [--prompt-password] [-l <path>] [-t <output>]
                      [-c <json>] [-w] [--statistics]

Options

• -d <dbname>

  Specify database name to connect to (default: $PGDATABASE or $USER)

• -f <file>

  Specify output file prefix (default: <dbname>)

• --host <host>

  Specify database server host (default: $PGHOST or localhost)

• -p <port>

  Specify database server port (default: $PGPORT or 5432)

• -u <username>

  Specify database username (default: $PGUSER or $USER)

• --password '<pw>'

  Specify database password (default: blank)

• --prompt-password

  Have py_autodoc prompt for a password

• [-l|--library] <path>

  Path to the templates (default: templates)

• [-t|--type] <output>

  Type of output wanted (default: All in template library)

  • html

    The HTML is human readable (via web browser), representing the entire schema within a single HTML document, and includes referenceable labels for each object.

  • dia

    This remaps the schema into XML using the XML schema of Dia, an interactive diagramming tool. It does not do any automated layout, so making the diagram usable would require manual work, so this is often not terribly useful.

  • xml

    The second type of XML is similar to HTML, but is in DocBook 4 format. It enables you to mix schema documentation with other DocBook documentation via the XREFs, generating PDFs, HTML, RTF, or other formatted documents. Object references can be made between these tools and JavaDoc with use of appropriate XREFs (see ~xreflabel~ elements in the XML).

  • dot, neato

    This generates the schema in the form accepted by GraphViz dot and neato respectively, which draws the schema as an undirected graph

  • zigzag.dia

    This generates a diagram for Dia in another form

• [-c|--config] <json>

  Config file (default: input/<database>.json). Contains:

  1. whitelist and blacklist regular expressions for schemas;
  2. whitelist and blacklist regular expressions for tables and functions of concrete schema if required.

• -w

  Use ~/.pgpass for authentication (overrides all other password options)

• --statistics

  help='With the contrib module pgstattuple installed we can gather statistics on the tables in the database (average size, free space, disk space used, dead tuple counts, etc.) This is disk intensive on large databases as all pages must be visited

Authors

• original Perl version (uses HTML::Template)

  • Rod Taylor <autodoc@rbt.ca>

• python3 version (uses Mako)

  • Semen Piskarev <piskarevsa@mail.ru>

License

LGPLv3