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Posted by x0z 1 day ago

OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine(github.com)
366 points | 80 comments
mmastrac 1 day ago|
This is awesome. I built a lightweight home status server called Stylus that would probably pair very well with this:

https://github.com/mmastrac/stylus

It works by automatically changing CSS classes, and it looks like the underlying isoflow library should support this.

Valodim 20 hours ago|
Looks great! One recommendation, move the screenshots more to the top of the readme. It says "Stylus (style + status)" first sentence, and leaves the reader with a dangling "so what is the style?!" until way lower, after a theory of operation section ;)
mmastrac 10 hours ago||
Thanks for that feedback, will totally do that. I should probably update the sample screenshots to be a little more visually appealing, as well.
gtirloni 1 day ago||
This looks amazing. I find Mermaid.js ugly and the syntax difficult/buggy but unfortunately it's one of the best supported diagram tools in static site generators. It'd be awesome to have Isoflow diagrams embedded in Markdown like that.
x0z 1 day ago||
Thanks! That'd definitely be interesting to look into, I'll put it on my TODO
Tsarp 21 hours ago|||
I had the same issue. I found this and it works decently well and OSS.

https://mermaid-to-excalidraw.vercel.app/

cybrox 1 day ago|||
I love the idea of mermaid but the syntax is somewhat convolutes and the integrations in tools like GitLab are very unstable.
LtdJorge 17 hours ago|||
I don't know why, but I find the syntax pretty decent when you get used to it. It's declarative.
SOLAR_FIELDS 1 day ago|||
That's more of a takedown of whoever built the Gitlab tool than Mermaid itself.

In the world where LLM's are very good at mermaid diagrams is the syntax even that terribly important?

EatFlamingDeath 22 hours ago||
What a terrible take
mgoetzke 1 day ago||
Markdown integration would be really great.
romeo88 18 hours ago||
I’d argue even necessary for success.
pjbk 1 day ago||
I always loved the isometric diagrams on Clive Maxfield's [1] books about electronics. Since a lot of circuits are non-planar (flip flops, semiconductor layers, FPGA architecture), adding a perspective view makes things uncluttered, and easier to understand and remember. I think it translates well to many technologies.

[1] https://www.clivemaxfield.com

kingnothing 1 day ago||
If you care, Snowflake launched a product called Openflow less than a month ago. Yours will probably be very difficult to discover.
esseph 1 day ago|
There's also a network telemetry protocol called OpenFlow that every network engineer knows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFlow

foobiekr 1 day ago|||
I was going to note the same thing. The networking openflow is the first hit on google and bing; why do people not websearch?
esseph 1 day ago||
"OpenRouter" is another one that drives me nuts.

"You mean FRR?" https://frrouting.org/

liotier 16 hours ago||||
Reading the title, I expected cute network diagrams from aggregated OpenFlow telemetry !
burnt-resistor 1 day ago|||
This is immediately what I thought of. Terrible name collision.
Valodim 19 hours ago||
So if this can be hosted as a github page, why not make the "quick start" section a link to just use the PWA?
x0z 1 day ago||
I've not done anything special here, just wrapped the community edition of ISOFLOW https://github.com/markmanx/isoflow and made it dead easy to set up and run. You can now export and load JSON backups of your diagrams allowing you to essentially have as many as you want, which the community version of ISOFLOW restricts. Enjoy!
lovelearning 1 day ago||
I'm not very familiar with Node.js. Any idea where in isoflow's code are the graphics for those 3D-style icons? Are they SVG or what? Is it possible to add custom icons?
kevlened 22 hours ago|||
The docs for the icons: https://isoflow.io/docs/isopacks

Collections of SVGs for the icons: https://github.com/markmanx/isopacks/tree/main/collections

rixed 1 day ago|||
I was curious also. The SVGs for the isoflow library of icons is in node_modules/@isoflow/isopacks/dist/isopacks.md

(yes, svg within base64 within markdown)

mh- 1 day ago||
Thank you for the parenthetical there. When I read your first line I thought, "surely they didn't.."

They did.

gnatolf 1 day ago||
Curious what's the argument for/against that here. I agree it's at least unusual.
mh- 1 day ago||
I don't have any good argument in either direction, if I'm being honest. Just feels.. weird.
donatj 1 day ago||
I am unclear exactly, what is this doing on top of Isoflow? Seems like Isoflow is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here?
x0z 1 day ago|
No you're absolutely right, isoflow is doing 90% of the work here, I'm not hiding that, they just don't have a ready to use version like this of their community pack. That's all this is.
smokel 1 day ago||
You aren't hiding it, but the announcement and first paragraphs in the README suggest otherwise. It comes off as a bit disingenuous, perhaps you are not aware of this?
martypitt 1 day ago||
Diagrams look great - well done.

Reminds me of a similar project years ago that was doing the same thing - they ultimately struggled with monetization and folded (I forget the name) -- however this one is MIT OSS, so I'm guessing that's not a key concern right now.

Note that your "Built with the Isoflow library" link at the bottom to isoflow 404's to https://github.com/isoflow/isoflow

x0z 1 day ago|
Thanks! I can't take any credit at all for the icons/design that's all Isoflow, but their community edition is designed to steer you to the pro version.

No plans at all for money making, just want people to enjoy using it.

Thank you for pointing out the link, I'll get on that ;)

busssard 1 day ago||
it would be great to have an easier time to add my custom icon svg or even links to svg and then scaling them automatically to size

this way i could tell the LLM that will be generating my JSON to include the following links as X and create the output JSON immediately

x0z 1 day ago||
I'll add it to the todo
Animux 1 day ago||
If this could be hosted on GH pages, is there any demo link?
x0z 1 day ago|
https://codesandbox.io/p/sandbox/github/markmanx/isoflow

^ ISOFLOW have an online demo you can use :)

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