mermaid-js

mermaid-cli

JavaScript2022–2026

mermaid-js / mermaid-cli

mermaid-cli

Command line tool for the Mermaid library

Command Line Libraries & SDKs

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10Mentions

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5.2KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Command line tool for the Mermaid library

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

mermaid-js/mermaid · linked in 3 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year10 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2022-05-05 15:12:37 UTC to 2026-08-12 03:31:11 UTC.

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	3
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2

What Hacker News says

10 sources

nylonstrung·Aug 12, 2026

Is this not open source enough for your purposes? https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-live-editor https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli OP's product is not open source btw

In Show HN: Line9 – A Mermaid rendering engine with its own layout

vablings·Feb 5, 2026

I will let you make that determination https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli/blob/f87dcd0c9049a... https://github.com/1jehuang/mermaid-rs-renderer/blob/9d6790b...

In Show HN: Mmdr – 1000x faster Mermaid rendering in pure Rust (no browser)

shagie·Mar 13, 2025

Digging, there's https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli For graphviz, the "problem" with it is that it truly is general purpose and trying to make a general purpose syntax for diagrams is difficult. Mermaid tackles this by not having it be applicable to all possible graphs (flow chart has a different syntax than gitGraph) allowing for a better domain specific language for each subset of functionality. https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/packet.html is really neat... and it would be a pain to do that in GraphViz ... but I believe that's more of a demonstration that it might be better to do specific syntaxes for specific types of diagrams. The most general Mermaid form is https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/block.html - and that syntax doesn't really feel like it is an improvement over GraphViz.

In Ask HN: What do you use to create diagrams?

aloisklink·Jan 18, 2025

I think there are two slightly different issues here! 1. SVGs generated by Mermaid use the SVG 2 features, but other than browsers, most libraries only support SVG 1.1 features, i.e. <https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/issues/2102>, which is what the other comment mentioned. 2. Mermaid requires a browser layout engine to render the diagrams (your issue), i.e. <https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/issues/3650>. This is something I also really want to fix (I maintain the [`mermaid-js/mermaid-cli`][1] project and we need to use Puppeteer/Headless Chrome to render mermaid diagrams, which isn't ideal.) However, I don't think this would be easy, since we'd need a browserless tool that supports a browser-like layout engine (although I'm hoping that [Servo][2] might eventually be able to support it). And if you do want to do headless renders

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of Mermaid diagrams, I'd recommend using (or adapting, since the code is all MIT licensed and I'm not aware of one that uses Selenium): - <https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli>, which uses Puppeteer as the headless browser API. - <https://github.com/remcohaszing/mermaid-isomorphic>, which uses Playwright as the headless browser API. And make sure that whatever server is doing the headless renders of Mermaid diagrams has all the correct fonts installed! [1]: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli [2]: https://servo.org/

In Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams

pjungwir·Oct 16, 2024

I've used [mmdc](https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli) to generate mermaid images from a Makefile. It looks like it is implemented with puppeteer, so perhaps it doesn't quite fit your request. But if you just want something you can use at the cli, it is great.

In Show HN: Mermaid ASCII Diagrams

strken·Jul 22, 2024

I was going to point to https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli, but it uses puppeteer and chromium under the hood. That seems...excessive, to render an SVG.

In Mermaid Gantt diagrams for displaying distributed traces in Markdown (2023)

jasonjmcghee·Oct 2, 2023

There is https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli

In Nomnoml

ree-san·Jul 24, 2023

I have used https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli

In The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Sequence Diagrams in MermaidJS

aloisklink·Jul 24, 2023

I'm one of the maintainers of the mermaid-cli project, and unfortunately, no. Mermaid needs a browser's layout engine to run properly [1], but I haven't yet seen a library that will help us without puppeteer. And yep, NPM (or another Node.JS package manager) is still needed for installation. I was working on trying to bundle all of mermaid-cli's dependencies (aka Node.JS, puppeteer) into one massive single-file exe last weekend, but it's seems we're blocked by missing features in other packages [2]. If anyone has any ideas on how to implement these things easily, feel free to help-out :) I'm also not a big fan of puppeteer, so I'd love to see a way to go without it. [1]: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/issues/3650 [2]: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli/issues/467#issueco...

In The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Sequence Diagrams in MermaidJS

gertlex·May 5, 2022

I come from past experiments with (py)graphviz, yed, probably a couple other forgotten things. (As well as manual diagrams in LucidChart and even Inkscape.) And am generally a non-web python guy. I was looking at Mermaid last weekend, since a coworker has praised it a few times and I was wanting to play with it. I think my expectation of how to use it was wrong? I typically expect to share my diagrams as .png files. The main documentation didn't seem to give much guidance in this usecase. I ended up going to https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli ... there didn't seem to be a simple install-and-use pathway similar to `apt` or `pip`, so I ended up trying the docker image for it. I got it working to create pngs, but I thought having to mess with docker volume mounts and defining my own aliases (`alias mermaid='docker run -u $UID -it --

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rm -v ~/mermaid:/data minlag/mermaid-cli -i'` so I can do `mermaid blah.mmd` in my ~/mermaid folder) was a bit cumbersome... Just sharing to see if there's hot takes on where I went wrong, I guess. (for example, I certainly didn't extensively read the docs to understand the usage paradigm it's intended for)

In Mermaid: Create diagrams and visualizations using text and code