OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine
34 comments
·July 1, 2025mmastrac
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.
gtirloni
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.
cybrox
I love the idea of mermaid but the syntax is somewhat convolutes and the integrations in tools like GitLab are very unstable.
x0z
Thanks! That'd definitely be interesting to look into, I'll put it on my TODO
pjbk
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.
donatj
I am unclear exactly, what is this doing on top of Isoflow? Seems like Isoflow is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here?
dr_kretyn
"beautiful" here is definitely subjective. I only see a diagram and it looks like from PowerPoint presentation from the marketing team to the sales team.
Why JS world frequently uses "beautiful" or "modern" to describe its project? Often that hides something else.
swalsh
You can just not post if your criticism is mean spirited.
martypitt
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
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
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
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
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?
zero0529
Can you export to other formats than JSON?
progx
Node version? Could not get it running with 22 or 24 on linux.
BigJ1211
Works on 24.3.0 for me, though many a warning is thrown.
x0z
24.3 for me, whats the issue you're getting?
Animux
If this could be hosted on GH pages, is there any demo link?
x0z
https://codesandbox.io/p/sandbox/github/markmanx/isoflow
^ ISOFLOW have an online demo you can use :)
h1fra
NB: it's using isoflow
If it can consume terraform state and visualize it, that would be amazing.