This is a command-line interface (CLI) for mermaid. It takes a mermaid definition file as input and generates an svg/png/pdf file as output.

Locate how to call the mmdc executable for your preferred method i.e. Docker, Yarn, NPM, global install, etc. Try these examples to get started quickly.

mmdc -i input.mmd -o output.svg

mmdc -i input.mmd -o output.png -t dark -b transparent

mmdc -i readme.template.md -o readme.md

This command transforms a markdown file itself. The mermaid-cli will find the mermaid diagrams, create SVG files from them and refer to those in the markdown output.

This:

### Some markdown
```mermaid
graph
   [....]
```

### Some more markdown
```mermaid
sequenceDiagram
   [....]
```

Becomes:

### Some markdown
![diagram](./readme-1.svg)

### Some more markdown
![diagram](./readme-2.svg)

You can easily pipe input from stdin. This example shows how to use a heredoc to send a diagram as stdin to mermaid-cli (mmdc).

cat << EOF  | mmdc
    graph TD
    A[Client] --> B[Load Balancer]
EOF

mmdc -h

docker pull minlag/mermaid-cli

or pull from Github Container Registry

docker pull ghcr.io/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli/mermaid-cli

or e.g. version 8.8.0

docker pull minlag/mermaid-cli:8.8.0

The container looks for input files in /data. So for example, if you have a diagram defined on your system in /path/to/diagrams/diagram.mmd, you can use the container to generate an SVG file as follows:

docker run -it -v /path/to/diagrams:/data minlag/mermaid-cli -i /data/diagram.mmd

Some people are having issues installing this tool globally. Installing it locally is an alternative solution:

yarn add @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli
./node_modules/.bin/mmdc -h

Or use NPM:

npm install @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli
./node_modules/.bin/mmdc -h

❗️ We do NOT recommend installing it globally because both YARN and NPM could fail to install a command-line tool globally properly due to weird permission issues. yarn global add @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli or npm install -g @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli

brew install mermaid-cli

npx is installed by default with NPM. It downloads and runs commands at the same time. To use Mermaid CLI with npx, you need to use the -p flag because the package name is different than the command it installs (mmdc). npx -p @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli mmdc -h

1. Linux sandbox issue
2. Docker permission denied issue

Contributions are welcome. See the contribution guide.