Create a system context diagram showing how your app connects to users and external services with a few lines of text.
Generate container diagrams that show the main technical building blocks of your software and how they communicate.
Document a deployment architecture showing how software components map to servers or cloud infrastructure.
Produce sequence diagrams styled consistently with the rest of your C4 architecture documentation.
C4-PlantUML is a library that lets you draw software architecture diagrams using a text-based approach. Instead of dragging boxes around in a drawing tool, you write simple text descriptions and the library turns them into clean, consistent diagrams. It is built on top of two existing things: PlantUML, which is a tool that generates diagrams from plain text, and the C4 model, which is a structured way of describing software systems. The C4 model breaks software architecture down into several levels of detail. At the outermost level you describe the whole system and the people or other systems that interact with it. Zooming in, you describe the main technical pieces (such as web applications, databases, or mobile apps) and how they communicate. Zooming in further, you describe the internal components of each piece. C4-PlantUML gives you ready-made commands for each of these levels so you do not have to draw everything from scratch. The library supports several diagram types: system context diagrams (the big picture), system landscape diagrams (multiple related systems side by side), container diagrams, component diagrams, deployment diagrams that show how software maps to infrastructure, dynamic diagrams that show how elements interact at runtime, and sequence diagrams styled to match the C4 look. You include the library in a PlantUML file with a single line, then use its shorthand commands to place elements and draw relationships between them. You can customize colors and styles using tags, add icons, and control how elements are arranged on the page. The library ships with snippets for Visual Studio Code and live templates for IntelliJ to speed up writing. The project is open source, licensed under MIT, and is part of the official PlantUML standard library. The full README is longer than what was shown.
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