Notes on beyondcode-laravel/er-diagram-generator

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:28:38 +0100

Notes on beyondcode-laravel-er-diagram-generator

Generate entity relation diagrams from your Laravel model files.

Overview

I have used different software over the years to produce schema diagrams of database structures in order to quickly gain or remind myself of the moving parts of what I’m working with. It seemed to me there should really be something for laravel which utilises the artisan command to do this.

Terms

“ER Diagram” - Entity Relationship Diagram

What it does

This software provides a new artisan command

Installation

sudo apt-get install graphviz
# install instructions
composer require beyondcode/laravel-er-diagram-generator --dev

First impressions

The command has no filters, so you get the whole thing and it’s too much for an established codebase. You can filter by updating a config file.

There is an output format of text for LLM usage.

Pros

Quick to install.
Contains all the data
Looks to DB for column types

Cons

Can’t specify on the command line a single Model and it’s relations.
Graphic output is not searchable.
Graphviz gets all the relations on a massive png, but not in an easy way to find what you are looking for. The lines between entitites are too large.

Look at this and imagine following a bunch of lines to find the relations:

Notes

This is not a good choice as of 09/06/2026 if you have more than a dozen or so tables/models in your project and you want to investigate them in parts.

But you could use the output to get the .dot to then edit and pass to graphviz. That could be a pain though.

Beyondcode on R A Fletcher's Blog