The 2019 Camunda Summer Hackdays was a good place to work on long-time planned projects which I had no time for the last months. After three days we built a good working prototype on how to render BPMN diagrams on GitHub. Checkout and leave some feedback or a star out there ⭐️.

General Problem

It's currently hard to display BPMN files on GitHub. In the case of images, the application offers post-processing of the uploaded files in order to quickly display them. Unfortunately, this does not work for process diagrams. This kind of diagrams can be really helpful to outline feature requirements or bug root analysis. Right now, it requires to open these BPMN files in an external tool, as bpmn.io, to properly display them or to convert the files to images.

Hacking Prototypes

In the 2019 Camunda Hackdays we wanted to create several prototypes in order to automatically render BPMN files in GitHub repositories. In the resulted repository we provide these solutions. It solves the problem in two ways:

Automatically render BPMN files in Issues and Pull Requests

The self-hosted probot application offers an auto-rendering of uploaded BPMN files via bpmn.io.

Automatically render BPMN, CMMN and DMN diagrams in repository file tree via hover

You can easily include the resulted userscript via Tampermonkey or use the adapted Chrome extension.

Conclusion

The resulting project offers an easy way to quickly display your beloved BPMN, CMMN or DMN files in your GitHub repository. We plan to increase the feature set soon, as long we find time for that. Feel free to try out the solutions, we'd love to hear some feedback ❤️ and receive some 🌟 on GitHub.