Plug and play installation for Windows

+1 vote
asked Nov 22, 2020 in Wanted features by plantuml (294,960 points)

Many users have issues in installing GraphViz on windows, mainly because it sometimes requires to be admin.

Recently boessu has built a specific GraphViz distribution which does not need to be admin. This distribution is hosted here.

Now, we can do even more: we could integrate in PlantUML.jar this archive (about 400 KB packed with brotli). This way, under windows, if no default installation of GraphViz is detected, instead of displaying an error message, we could silently unpack this archive in some TEMP folder and run GraphViz from there.

For end users, this would greatly simplify PlantUML installation and run. Of course, this would only work under windows.

Any though about it ?

Thanks!

1 Answer

0 votes
answered Nov 23, 2020 by Serge Wenger Work (15,620 points)

Hello,

Nice idea. I do some tests with GraphvizLite. There is some other dependencies with my examples

png: GraphvizLite
png + math: GraphvizLite + jlatexmath-minimal-1.0.3.jar
svg: GraphvizLite
svg + math: GraphvizLite+ jlatexmath-minimal-1.0.3.jar + batik-all-1.7.jar. There is still exceptions in the console, but the result is OK. To remove Exceptions I need to add jlm_greek.jar + jlm_cyrillic.jar. Described in https://plantuml.com/fr/ascii-math

commented Nov 23, 2020 by plantuml (294,960 points)
Thanks for your tests, Serge !

However, the issues about missing .jar files are completely unrelated to GraphViz. You only need those files for "math". Since this is not central to PlantUML, we did not integrate them into PlantUML.jar. You still have to manually install them. Sorry about that.

About GraphVizLite, we have built a new beta that does the job: http://beta.plantuml.net/plantuml.jar

That is, you can run this version on Windows without installing GraphViz by yourself. If no GraphViz is detected on your host, GraphVizLite will be silently installed to %TEMP%\_graphviz

It seems to work for us, but testing is not that easy, so feedback is welcome.

Although this is really a hack, I think it will greatly simplify PlantUML use under Windows.
commented Nov 23, 2020 by Serge Wenger Work (15,620 points)

Hello,

No problem for the math. I use it only a few. I remove this math test and it work well (png and svg) with plantuml1.2020.21Beta1.

Thanks

commented Dec 29, 2020 by krasa (820 points)
It seems that `net.sourceforge.plantuml.cucadiagram.dot.GraphvizUtils#dotExecutable` is now ignored and it does not work for some if "The administrators restricted permissions to only run programs under specific directories which they control."

https://github.com/esteinberg/plantuml4idea/issues/280
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