What's the best way to generate a UML diagram from Python source code? [closed]

You may have heard of Pylint that helps statically checking Python code. Few people know that it comes with a tool named Pyreverse that draws UML diagrams from the Python code it reads. Pyreverse uses Graphviz as a backend.

It is used like this:

pyreverse -o png -p yourpackage .

where the . can also be a single file.

Epydoc is a tool to generate API documentation from Python source code. It also generates UML class diagrams, using Graphviz in fancy ways. Here is an example of diagram generated from the source code of Epydoc itself.

Because Epydoc performs both object introspection and source parsing it can gather more informations respect to static code analysers such as Doxygen: it can inspect a fair amount of dynamically generated classes and functions, but can also use comments or unassigned strings as a documentation source, e.g. for variables and class public attributes.

Check this list of seven uml tools for python

Certain classes of well-behaved programs may be diagrammable, but in the general case, it can't be done. Python objects can be extended at run time, and objects of any type can be assigned to any instance variable. Figuring out what classes an object can contain pointers to (composition) would require a full understanding of the runtime behavior of the program.

Python's metaclass capabilities mean that reasoning about the inheritance structure would also require a full understanding of the runtime behavior of the program.

To prove that these are impossible, you argue that if such a UML diagrammer existed, then you could take an arbitrary program, convert "halt" statements into statements that would impact the UML diagram, and use the UML diagrammer to solve the halting problem, which as we know is impossible.

It is worth mentioning Gaphor. A Python modelling/UML tool.