libraryize & wrap CLI around library about mermaid.cli

[tylerlong]

I think it'd be neat to programmatically use mermaid, in node. Maybe call it "mermaid-serverside".

The idea of mermaid-serverside is cool. However, mermaid currently cannot work without a browser (either a normal browser or a headless browser such as puppeteer). So mermaid could not be a pure node.js library (which doesn't depend on browsers)

I'd like to make an img-url parser, so you can inline the source of the graph in the URL and get an image.

We have something similar: https://mermaidjs.github.io/mermaid-live-editor/#/view/Z3JhcGggVEQKQVtDaHJpc3RtYXNdIC0tPnxHZXQgbW9uZXl8IEIoR28gc2hvcHBpbmcpCkIgLS0-IEN7TGV0IG1lIHRoaW5rfQpDIC0tPnxPbmV8IERbTGFwdG9wXQpDIC0tPnxUd298IEVbaVBob25lXQpDIC0tPnxUaHJlZXwgRltDYXJdCg

It would also mean that I can pre-render graphs, so there is no flash of graph-source on pages (I made a gatsby plugin, for example, that has some hacks to make it work browser-only, but I'd prefer they were pre-built.)

As I said above, pre-render without a browser is currently impossible. But if you know how to make it possible, that would be super great! I used to try jsdom but failed.

If we had this, it'd be really simple to just wrap the CLI around that bit. If there is interest, I'd be happy to write it, and make a PR for this project to use the lib.

I don't know if this is helpful. Because this library needs a browser to work. So there is no pre-render in memory only. And it is not a pure node library which doesn't depend on browsers.

Please feel free to post more comments. I will leave this issue open for now.

[konsumer]

We have something similar:

That's cool, but I meant like this, with source inline in image-link, so you can use it directly:

As I said above, pre-render without a browser is currently impossible

Yeh, I get that, but I mean in the same way you use puppeteer to create a chrome-headless client, render it, and return it. I dunno, maybe it makes no sense to integrate with this. The CLI is pretty light, maybe I should just make a separate library that works the same way, based on your great work. At some point, if I get a wild hair, maybe I'll do some realy node-space rendering though, as mermaid uses d3, and there is a node d3.

[tylerlong]

It will be super cool if you can make mermaid a pure node.js library. Actually I think it is possible, just more investigation is needed.

[konsumer]

Yep, totally agreed. I think it's very close with node-d3, but in the interim, I could wrap puppeteer, as you have, to make a server-side renderer (which was my original thought.)

If I have some time, I will investigate this week, and see what it would take to make it render in node-d3. If nothing else, it'd give us a list to work through for things needed to support that.

[rhinenoir]

@konsumer If you dont mind, Any solution now？

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[tylerlong]

Please read this thread: mermaid-js/mermaid#559

I will close it for now.