This tour takes about five minutes and gets you from a blank screen to a real ERD. It assumes you have already installed the offline ERD tool (see Install & First Launch).
1. Open a diagram
On the workspace screen, open the seeded Sample Blog Diagram to see a finished schema, or create a new connection with the Conn method set to None to start an empty offline diagram. See Connections Overview for what each field means.
2. Add your first entity
On the canvas, add an entity (Schemity’s term for a table) and name it users. Add a few fields - an id marked PK, an email, and a created_at. Field editing is covered in Entities & Fields.
3. Add a related entity
Add a second entity, orders. Draw a relationship from orders to users; Schemity adds the foreign key field and renders the link in crow’s foot notation as one-to-many. Relationships are covered in Relationships.
4. Focus the view
If your real schema is large, you will not want every entity on one canvas. Create a Context View that shows only the entities relevant to a feature.
5. Save it
Schemity writes your diagram to disk as JSON in the workspace folder. To version it, keep the workspace inside a Git repository and commit:
git add docs/erd/
git commit -m "Add users and orders ERD"Your schema is now under version control, reviewable in a pull request like any other change. That is the point of a Git-native ERD tool.
Where to go next
- Connect to a real database in Connections Overview.
- Reverse-engineer an existing schema in Reverse-Engineer an Existing Database.