To be able to generate some diagrams, you must have Graphviz software installed on your machine.

Important note about version

PlantUML should be working with any version of Graphviz, starting with 2.26.3

The following versions have been tested, and are known to work:

However, it is possible that some cases with some versions have issues:

If you compile Graphviz by yourself, you have to build it with libexpat in order to work with PlantUML.

If you find something wrong, thanks for sending us a note or posting a message on the forum.

Default

By default, the dot executable should be:

* Firstly in: ''c:\Program Files\Graphviz*\bin\dot.exe''
* Then in: ''c:\Program Files (x86)\Graphviz*\bin\dot.exe''

* Firstly in: ''/usr/local/bin/dot''
* Then in: ''/usr/bin/dot''

You can also specify the environment variable GRAPHVIZ_DOT to set the exact location of your GraphViz executable.

You can easily install GraphViz by installing brew on your Mac machine. This could fix issues if you have installed GraphViz as .dmg package.

brew install libtool
brew link libtool
brew install graphviz
brew link --overwrite graphviz

To have information about where PlantUML expects to find dot, you can use the command line:

java -jar plantuml.jar -testdot

You can also use this special diagram description:

@startuml
testdot
@enduml