Directives gives a diagram author the capability to alter the appearance of a diagram before rendering by changing the applied configuration.
The significance of having directives is that you have them available while writing the diagram, and can modify the default global and diagram specific configurations. So, directives are applied on top of the default configurations. The beauty of directives is that you can use them to alter configuration settings for a specific diagram, i.e. at an individual level.
While directives allow you to change most of the default configuration settings, there are some that are not available, that too for security reasons. Also, you do have the _option to define the set of configurations_ that you would allow to be available to the diagram author for overriding with help of directives.
1._General/Top Level configurations_ : These are the configurations that are available and applied to all the diagram. **Some of the most important top-level** configurations are:
2._Diagram specific configurations_ : These are the configurations that are available and applied to a specific diagram. For each diagram there are specific configuration that will alter how that particular diagram looks and behaves.
For example, `mirrorActors` is a configuration that is specific to the `SequenceDiagram` and alter whether the actors are mirrored or not. So this config is available only for the `SequenceDiagram` type.
**NOTE:** These options listed here are not all the configuration options. To get hold of all the configuration options, please refer to the [defaultConfig.js](https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/blob/develop/src/defaultConfig.js) in the source code.
Here the structure of a directive text is like a nested key-value pair map or a JSON object with root being _init_. Where all the general configurations are defined in the top level, and all the diagram specific configurations are defined one level deeper with diagram type as key/root for that section.
Here the directive declaration will set the `logLevel` to `debug` and the `theme` to `dark` for a rendered mermaid diagram, changing the appearance of the diagram itself.
Note: You can use 'init' or 'initialize' as both acceptable as init directives. Also note that `%%init%%` and `%%initialize%%` directives will be grouped together after they are parsed. This means:
For complete list of flowchart configurations, see [defaultConfig.js](https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/blob/develop/src/defaultConfig.js) in the source code.