**Mermaid lets you represent diagrams using text and code.** This simplifies maintianing complex diagrams. It is a Javascript based diagramming and charting tool that renders Markdown-inspired text definitions to create and modify diagrams dynamically. The main purpose of Mermaid is to help Documentation catch up with Development.
Many editors, wikis and other tools have mermaid integrations already making it easy to start using mermaid. A few of those are described in [Simple start to write diagrams](./n00b-GettingStarted.md).
Mermaid addresses this Catch-22 by cutting the time, effort and tooling that is required to create modifiable diagrams and charts, for smarter and more reusable content.
Mermaid, as a text-based diagramming tool allows for quick and easy updates, it can also be made part of production scripts (and other pieces of code), to make documentation much easier.
With Mermaid less time needs to be spent on making diagrams, as a separate documentation task. <br/>
Even non-programmers can create diagrams through the [Mermaid Live Editor](https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-live-editor), Visit the [Tutorials Page](./Tutorials.md) for the Live Editor video tutorials.
Want to see what can be built with mermaid, or what applications already support it? Read the [Integrations and Usages for Mermaid](./integrations.md).
For a more detailed introduction to Mermaid and some of it's more basic uses, look to the [Overview for Beginners](./n00b-overview.md) and [Usage](./usage.md).
:trophy: **Mermaid was nominated and won the [JS Open Source Awards (2019)](https://osawards.com/javascript/#nominees) in the category "The most exciting use of technology"!!!**
**Thanks to all involved, people committing pull requests, people answering questions and special thanks to Tyler Long who is helping me maintain the project 🙏**
**Doing so will command the mermaid parser to look for the `<div>` tags with `class="mermaid"` in your HTML Document. From these tags mermaid will try to read the diagram/chart definitons and render them as svg charts.**
We recommend you installing [editor plugins](https://eslint.org/docs/user-guide/integrations) so you can get real time lint result.
### Test
```
yarn test
```
Manual test in browser: open `dist/index.html`
### Release
For those who have the permission to do so:
Update version number in `package.json`.
```
npm publish
```
Command above generates files into the `dist` folder and publishes them to npmjs.org.
## Credits
Many thanks to the [d3](http://d3js.org/) and [dagre-d3](https://github.com/cpettitt/dagre-d3) projects for providing the graphical layout and drawing libraries!
Thanks also to the [js-sequence-diagram](http://bramp.github.io/js-sequence-diagrams) project for usage of the grammar for the sequence diagrams. Thanks to Jessica Peter for inspiration and starting point for gantt rendering.
_Mermaid was created by Knut Sveidqvist for easier documentation._
Here is the full list of the projects [contributors](https://github.com/knsv/mermaid/graphs/contributors).