While trying to wrap my head around some of the NetBox database relationships, I found myself wishing for a database schema diagram. I looked through the documentation and code repo, but didn’t find anything. A colleague recommended trying schemaspy, so I tried it.
Setup
I set up a fresh install of netbox on a Debian 10 VM, and downloaded schemaspy and its dependencies. Alternatively, they publish a Docker image.
Install Java
sudo apt install dfault-jdk
JDBC Driver
PostgreSQL has a download page for the JDBC driver.
Create an output directory
mkdir schemaspy
Run
The documentation listed all the needed options. Provide the path to the drive, the database credentials, and the output directory and format, and it will crank away on generating a report of the database structure.
$ java -jar schemaspy-6.1.0.jar -dp ./postgresql-42.2.23.jar -t pgsql11 -host localhost -db netbox -u netbox -p "$DBPW" -o schemaspy -vizjs
____ _ ____
/ ___| ___| |__ ___ _ __ ___ __ _/ ___| _ __ _ _
\___ \ / __| '_ \ / _ \ '_ ` _ \ / _` \___ \| '_ \| | | |
___) | (__| | | | __/ | | | | | (_| |___) | |_) | |_| |
|____/ \___|_| |_|\___|_| |_| |_|\__,_|____/| .__/ \__, |
|_| |___/
6.1.0
SchemaSpy generates an HTML representation of a database schema's relationships.
SchemaSpy comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
SchemaSpy is free software and can be redistributed under the conditions of LGPL version 3 or later.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/
INFO - Starting Main v6.1.0 on pxetest2 with PID 30796 (/home/jlavoie/schemaspy-6.1.0.jar started by jlavoie in /home/jlavoie)
INFO - The following profiles are active: default
INFO - Started Main in 3.304 seconds (JVM running for 4.489)
INFO - Starting schema analysis
INFO - Connected to PostgreSQL - 11.12 (Debian 11.12-0+deb10u1)
INFO - Gathering schema details
Gathering schema details...........................................................................................................(1sec)
Connecting relationships...........................................................................................................(2sec)
Writing/graphing summary.INFO - Gathered schema details in 2 seconds
INFO - Writing/graphing summary
Warning: Nashorn engine is planned to be removed from a future JDK release
........(250sec)
Writing/diagramming detailsINFO - Completed summary in 250 seconds
INFO - Writing/diagramming details
........................................................................................................(561sec)
Wrote relationship details of 104 tables/views to directory 'schemaspy' in 817 seconds.
View the results by opening schemaspy/index.html
INFO - Wrote table details in 561 seconds
INFO - Wrote relationship details of 104 tables/views to directory 'schemaspy' in 817 seconds.
INFO - View the results by opening schemaspy/index.html
Output
After a (surprisingly) long time, it produced a browsable report in the output directory, with lots of interesting information about the database.
SchemaSpy report
Heading over to the “Relationships” tab showed a diagram of the tables and their relationships – exactly what I was looking for!
A Section of the ‘compact’ Relationship Diagram
The graphviz line routing leaves a bit to be desired, but the diagram was immensely helpful in showing an overview of how the all the object types fit together.
Downloads
There are two diagrams generated, a “compact” and a “large”. I’ve included them here for the netbox version at this time of this writing, v3.0.2, both as the source DOT language, and the rendered SVG image.
| Compact | Large |
|---|---|
| dot | dot |
| svg | svg |
