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.

String constants and variables

The !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