There are three important features that were in the initial design of D2 that have not been done and hold it back from 1.0: globs, imports, and vars. This release brings imports.

Imports open up a world of possibilities and works beautifully to modularize diagrams. See the new docs to try it out today.

As usual, many improvements and bug fixes accompany this release. D2 0.5 produces more legible diagrams by masking obstructions (e.g. arrow going through a label), has better error messages to guide you, is faster at certain tasks, and addresses many issues brought by community bug reports.

Features 🚀

• D2 files have the ability to import from other D2 files. See docs. #1371
• sql_table alternatively takes an array of constraints instead of being limited to a single one. Thanks @satoqz ! #1245

Improvements 🧹

• Use shape-specific sizing for grid containers #1294
• Grid diagrams support nested shapes or grid diagrams #1309
• grid-gap, vertical-gap, and horizontal-gap apply to padding on grid diagrams #1309
• Watch mode browser uses an error favicon to easily indicate compiler errors. Thanks @sinyo-matu ! #1240
• Grid layout performance improved when there are many similarly sized shapes #1315
• Connections and labels are adjusted for shapes with 3d or multiple #1340
• Constraints in sql_table render even if they have no matching abbreviation #1372
• Constraints in sql_table sheds their excessive letter-spacing and is padded from the end consistently #1372
• Duplicate image URLs in icons are only fetched once #1373
• In watch mode, images are cached by default across compiles. Can be disabled with flag --img-cache=0. #1373
• Common invalid array separator , usage in class arrays returns a helpful error message #1376
• Invalid constraint usage is met with an error message, preventing a common mistake of omitting shape: sql_table #1379
• Connections no longer obscure outside labels #1381
• Container connections in dagre are more balanced #1384
• Connections that go through shape labels are now masked translucently #1383

Bugfixes ⛑️

• Shadow is no longer cut off when --pad is 0. Thank you @LeonardsonCC ! #1326
• Fixes grid layout overwriting label placements for nested objects #1345
• Fixes fonts not rendering correctly on certain platforms. Thanks @mikeday for identifying the solution. #1356
• Fixes folders not rendering in animations (--animate-interval) #1357
• Fixes panic using reserved keywords as containers #1358
• When multiple classes are change different attributes of arrowheads, they are all applied instead of only the last one #1362
• Prevent empty block strings #1364
• Fixes dagre mis-aligning a nested shape's connection #1370
• Fixes a bug in grids sometimes putting a shape on the next row/column #1380

Breaking changes

• @xyz is now reserved as a pattern for imports. If you previously had a key that started like that, it must either be renamed or quoted like "@xyz".
• Likewise with ...@xyz (spread operator import)