// the find
liam-hq/liam
Automatically generates beautiful and easy-to-read ER diagrams from your database.
Liam ERD generates interactive ER diagrams from existing schema files (Rails schema.rb, Prisma, PostgreSQL DDL, tbls). The public-repo trick of prepending a URL prefix is genuinely clever for zero-install use. Aimed at teams who want living database documentation without maintaining it by hand.
The URL-prefix approach for public repos is the best onboarding UX I've seen in this category — no install, no account, just tweak a URL. React Flow as the rendering layer means panning/zooming/filtering work well out of the box and the parser handles 100+ table schemas without choking. The parser supports multiple input formats (schema.rb, Prisma, raw SQL DDL, tbls YAML) from a single CLI, which is rare. The CI workflow setup is solid — schema drift detection as a GitHub Action means diagrams don't silently go stale.
The SaaS app layer (auth, organizations, billing, design sessions) is growing fast and the open-source ERD viewer is becoming a loss-leader for a hosted product — worth knowing if you're self-hosting and expect the core to stay focused. No support for MySQL or SQLite schema formats despite those being the most common targets for small projects. The 'AI design sessions' feature is being bolted onto what was a pure visualization tool; the chat API routes and LangGraph docs suggest the scope is expanding significantly, which could mean the core viewer quality gets less attention going forward. WebAssembly is listed as a topic but there's no indication in the tree where it's actually used — possibly aspirational or limited to the parser.