Include diagrams allow to document the include dependencies among different parts of the project. This can be very useful for instance to detect that a file was included from a module directory, on which specific part of the project should never depend.

The minimal config required to generate an include diagram is presented below:

diagrams:
  # Diagram name
  my_class_diagram:
    # Type of diagram (has to be `include`)
    type: include
    # Include only translation units matching the following patterns
    glob:
      - src/*.cc
    # Include also external system headers
    generate_system_headers: true
    # Include only classes and functions from files in `src` directory
    include:
      # Include only files belonging to these paths
      paths:
        - src

One distinctive option in include diagrams is relative_to, which tells clang-uml to render all filename paths relative to this directory.

The following table presents the PlantUML arrows representing relationships in the include diagrams.

UML	PlantUML	MermaidJS
Include (local)
Include (system)

Tracking system headers directly included by project sources

In case you would like to include the information about what system headers your project files include simply add the following option to the diagram:

generate_system_headers: true

This will include only system headers directly included from the project's source files (matched by glob) and not their dependencies, for example:

Please note that generating include diagram, which contains third party and system library headers will result in a huge diagram that is unlikely to be useful.

Generating include diagrams without directory packages

By default, clang-uml will generate include diagram with packages representing respective subdirectories in the project, and the source and header nodes are represented with only filenames without any path.

It is however possible to generate the include diagram without the packages, where each node contains the entire path relative to the project root. To enable this simply set:

generate_packages: false