Graphviz Generator: getting dot to run on serverless
A visual Graphviz editor that had to move from the dot binary to WebAssembly before it could be deployed at all.
Graphviz Generator is a visual editor for Graphviz diagrams: place nodes and edges on a canvas, pick a layout engine, and get DOT out. It is live, and its history is short — six commits over 16 and 17 August 2026.
The editor
The README lists what is in it: sixteen node shapes, full edge styling (arrowheads, line
styles), six layout engines (dot, neato, fdp, sfdp, circo, twopi), a graph
attributes panel, labelled clusters, and live DOT output that can be copied or downloaded.
Auto-layout sends the current graph to the chosen engine, parses the positions it returns
(-Tplain format) and snaps every node into place. There is 30-level undo and redo,
project save and load, and autosave every thirty seconds with restore on reload.
The one hard problem
The first version shelled out to the dot binary. That works on a laptop and cannot work
on a serverless host, where there is no such binary to run. On 16 August the work was a
port from the binary to WebAssembly, which is what made it deployable. A day later the
Graphviz endpoints gained shared rate limits, and Vercel’s web analytics were added.
There have been no commits since 17 August, and the project has no open items.
Written on 16 Oct 2026 from the repository’s README and commit history.