Generating ERD for Django models

About ERD

• ER Diagram stands for Entity Relationship Diagram
• It displays the relationship of entity sets stored in a database
• It helps to explain the logical structure of database
• ER diagrams are created based on three basic concepts: entities, attributes and relationship

Generating using Django extension

Django extension provides an option to generate ERD diagrams of the DB models

The following are steps to do so

• Install system level dependencies
• Following is an example command to install in Ubuntu:

• apt-get install -y python3-dev graphviz libgraphviz-dev pkg-config

• Install python library:

• pip install pygraphviz

• You have to specify the Django apps to generate the diagram.
• Either you can use -a argument to generate for all apps else specify apps in the command OR can choose to create settings for this in Django settings.py to persist the requirement
• Now the ER diagram can be generated by using the following command, run the command inside Django project directory: ./manage.py graph_models

Sample

To show you the sample ER diagram, I have used the following Django stub project: https://github.com/shacker/gtd and a library called "django-todo"

That altogether brings a Django project of a Todo app which has features like multi-user and group.
Sample command, I used

./manage.py graph_models -a --output=<DOCS_BUILD_DIR>/django-models.png

 

Here is the ER diagram of the project. Click on the image to view clearly










More information: Graph models — django-extensions 3.1.2 documentation