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Directed graph

digraph G {
    A -> B;
    B -> C -> D;
    B -> E;
}

Undirected graph

graph G {
    A -- B;
    B -- C -- D;
    B -- E;
}

Edge labels

digraph G {
    A -> B [label="goes to"];
}

Fork shorthand

The { } is shorthand for describing a fork.

digraph G {
    # Equivalent to:
    #   A -> B
    #   A -> C
    A -> {B C}
}

Shapes

Full list of shapes: https://graphviz.org/doc/info/shapes.html

digraph G {
    B [shape=cylinder];

    A -> B;
}

Preventing cyclic dependencies

Consider a graph A -> B -> A. Normally the render engine will render a cyclic graph with two nodes, A and B, where A points to B and B points back to A.

What we want instead is an acyclic graph with three nodes, where two of the nodes share the same name, A. To do so we can create two nodes with different names but similar labels.

digraph G {
    A1 [label="A"];
    A2 [label="A"];

    A1 -> B -> A2;
}

Left-to-right direction

digraph G {
    rankdir=LR;
    A -> B -> C;
}