mermaid-cli

This is a command-line interface (CLI) for mermaid. It takes a mermaid definition file as input and generates an svg/png/pdf file as output.

Example Usage

Locate how to call the mmdc executable for your preferred method i.e. Docker, Yarn, NPM, global install, etc. Try these examples to get started quickly.

Convert Mermaid mmd Diagram File To SVG

mmdc -i input.mmd -o output.svg

Create A PNG With A Dark Theme And Transparent Background

mmdc -i input.mmd -o output.png -t dark -b transparent

Piping from stdin

You can easily pipe input from stdin. This example shows how to use a heredoc to send a diagram as stdin to mermaid-cli (mmdc).

cat << EOF  | mmdc
    graph TD
    A[Client] --> B[Load Balancer]
EOF

See All Available Options

mmdc -h

Use Docker:

docker pull minlag/mermaid-cli

or e.g. version 8.8.0

docker pull minlag/mermaid-cli:8.8.0

The container looks for input files in /data. So for example, if you have a diagram defined on your system in /path/to/diagrams/diagram.mmd, you can use the container to generate an SVG file as follows:

docker run -it -v /path/to/diagrams:/data minlag/mermaid-cli -i /data/diagram.mmd

Install locally

Some people are having issue installing this tool globally. Installing it locally is an alternative solution:

yarn add @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli
./node_modules/.bin/mmdc -h

Or use NPM:

npm install @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli
./node_modules/.bin/mmdc -h

Install globally

❗️ We do NOT recommend installing it globally because both YARN and NPM could fail to install a command-line tool globally properly due to weird permission issues. yarn global add @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli or npm install -g @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli

Install with brew

brew install mermaid-cli

Run with npx

npx is installed by default with NPM. It downloads and runs commands at the same time. To use Mermaid CLI with npx, you need to use the -p flag because the package name is different than the command it installs (mmdc). npx -p @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli mmdc -h

Known issues

1. Linux sandbox issue

For contributors

Contributions are welcome. See the contribution guide.