arc42 - the template for effective, practical and pragmatic software architecture documentation and communication.

Initially created by Dr. Gernot Starke and Dr. Peter Hruschka (way back in 2005…​), free and open source.

This repository contains all downloadable versions plus the (AsciiDoc) source of the arc42 template.

It is used…​

• as the basis for generating (by the arc42-generator project) the official download formats (i.e. docx, markdown, docbook and others). To generate, THIS repo is included as submodule from the generator project. Use the gradle build contained here just for preview!

• to maintain structure, content and help for the template

• to keep non-asciidoc, non-generable formats (like Sparx® Enterprise-Architect® EAP).

In case you find issues within the template or its explanations, this is the repo to fix and issue pull requests :-)

• 8.2: Jan 28th 2023: Thx to A. Bentele, added imagedir def to all files, for easier editing asciidoc. See #178

We intend to provide all diagrams in platform-neutral formats, mainly drawio.

The source of these diagrams is embedded in a .png file. To make this explicit, we use the combined extension .drawio.png for our diagrams. The drawio tools will recognize this and open such files in the editor instead of an image viewer.

Therefore we will gradually remove all files under ./graphics-originals

Please refer to the official download page for all downloads.

The EN and DE versions are actively maintained by the founders (G.Starke & P.Hruschka). Translations to additional languages (see below) have been provided by volunteers, but won’t be automatically updated.

In case you want to build the HTML version of the template, just checkout this repo and call

on the command line. To select another language set the Gradle build property LANGUAGE to one of the provided languages, cf.

Currently (March 2022) you need to use Java 8 to build!

• see the extensive documentation website

• see the overview

Open an issue here!