Basics

DSL rules

• Lines are processed in order, and forward referencing is not supported (i.e. imperative rather than declarative).
• Line breaks are important; long lines can be split with \ as the last character on the line.
• Tokens must be separated by whitespace, but the quantity of whitespace/indentation isn’t important.
• Keywords are case-insensitive (e.g. you can use softwareSystem or softwaresystem).
• Double quote characters ("...") are optional when a property/expression contains no whitespace.
• Opening curly brace symbols ({) must be on the same line (i.e. the last token of the statement, not on a line of their own).
• Closing curly brace symbols (}) must be on a line of their own.
• Opening/closing braces are only required when adding child content.
• Use "" as a placeholder for an earlier optional property that you’d like to skip.
• Tags are comma separated (e.g. Tag 1,Tag 2,Tag 3) - see Structurizr - Notation for details of how tags and styling works.

Workspace rules

In addition, workspaces are subject to the following rules:

• Each view must have a unique “key” (this is generated for you if not specified; automatically generated view keys are not guaranteed to be stable over time, and you will likely lose manual layout information when using them in conjunction with Structurizr Lite/on-premises/cloud).
• Software and people names must be unique.
• Container names must be unique within the context of a software system.
• Component names must be unique within the context of a container.
• Deployment node names must be unique with their parent context.
• Infrastructure node names must be unique with their parent context.
• All relationships from a source element to a destination element must have a unique description.

Implied relationships

!impliedRelationships <true|false>

The !impliedRelationships keyword provides a way to enable or disable whether implied relationships are created. A value of false disables implied relationship creation, while true creates implied relationships between all valid combinations of the parent elements, unless any relationship already exists between them (see Structurizr for Java - Implied relationships - CreateImpliedRelationshipsUnlessAnyRelationshipExistsStrategy for more details).

String constants and variables

The !constant (deprecated) and !const keyword can be used to define a constant, which can be used with string substitution:

!const <name> <value>

Similarly, !var can be used to define a variable, which can later be redefined:

!var <name> <value>

Constant and variables names may only contain the following characters: a-zA-Z0-9-_.

String substitution

String substitution will take place on any text specified within a token using the ${NAME} syntax, where NAME corresponds to a string constant/variable or an environment variable. For example:

!const ORGANISATION_NAME "Organisation"
!const GROUP_NAME "Group"

workspace {

    model {
        group "${ORGANISATION_NAME} - ${GROUP_NAME}" {
            user = person "User"
        }
    }

}

If a named constant or environment variable cannot be found, the string will not be substituted. Names may only contain the following characters: a-zA-Z0-9-_.

Comments

Comments can be defined as follows:

/*
    multi-line comment
*/

/* single-line comment */

# single line comment

// single line comment