How to use SchemaSpy to document your database

3 min readNov 21, 2016

Sometimes we need to generate the proper documentation for our database and usually the documentation process can become tedious, fortunately nowadays there are several documentation tools like SchemaSpy to make this task easier and faster.

This post will show you how to generate the database documentation from a simple MySQL schema (User/Roles relationship).

SchemmaSpy (Official description)

SchemaSpy is a Java-based tool (requires Java 5 or higher) that analyzes the metadata of a schema in a database and generates a visual representation of it in a browser-displayable format

Prerequisites

Java 5 or higher installed.
Access to a MySQL server installation.
Graphviz installed → http://www.graphviz.org/

Configuration and Execution

Download SchemaSpy jar file (schemaSpy_5.0.0.jar) from → https://sourceforge.net/projects/schemaspy/files/
Download the MySQL Java Connector jar file (mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar) from → https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/
Execute the next command updating the parameter values based on your MySQL installation, MySQL credentials and the files downloaded previously (SchemaSpy and Java Connector)

java -jar C:\SchemaSpy\schemaSpy_5.0.0.jar -t mysql -host localhost -db spring-security-tutorial -u root -p admin -dp C:\SchemaSpy\mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar -o C:\SchemaSpy\DB_Documentation\

Note: if you are getting the next error message, please verify your Graphviz installation or use the -gv parameter to indicate the Graphviz folder location.

Command with the -gv parameter

java -jar C:\SchemaSpy\schemaSpy_5.0.0.jar -t mysql -host localhost -db spring-security-tutorial -u root -p admin -dp C:\SchemaSpy\mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin.jar -o C:\SchemaSpy\DB_Documentation\ -gv C:\software\graphviz-2.38

Commonly used parameters