PlantUML Pleasantness: Generate Graphical Version Information

If we want to know which version of PlantUML we are using, we can use the command line option -version. PlantUML will print the version along with some extra information like the machine name, memory, and more. However, we can also create a PlantUML definition with the command version and we can transform it to a graphical presentation, such as a PNG image. This can be handy if we use PlantUML in an environment like Asciidoctor with diagram support and we want to know which version of PlantUML is used.

In our first example, we run PlantUML from the command line and use the -version option:

$ plantuml -version
PlantUML version 8051 (Thu Dec 01 18:52:05 CET 2016)
(GPL source distribution)
Java Runtime: Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment
JVM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM
Java Version: 1.8.0_112-b16
Operating System: Mac OS X
OS Version: 10.12.1
Default Encoding: UTF-8
Language: en
Country: US
Machine: mrhaki-laptop-2015.fritz.box
PLANTUML_LIMIT_SIZE: 4096
Processors: 8
Max Memory: 3,817,865,216
Total Memory: 257,425,408
Free Memory: 249,050,832
Used Memory: 8,374,576
Thread Active Count: 2

The environment variable GRAPHVIZ_DOT has been set to /usr/local/bin/dot
Dot executable is /usr/local/bin/dot
Dot version: dot - graphviz version 2.38.0 (20140413.2041)
Installation seems OK. File generation OK
$

In the second example we create a file with the following PlantUML definition:

@startuml 
version
@enduml 

When we generate a PNG from this definition we get the following result:

Written with PlantUML 8051.