Date: 2026-09-20
Accepted
Amended by ADR-0006
The Components view shows 18 elements on the site home page. Left-to-right ranking makes it very wide, and it reads better top to bottom on a web page. Structurizr Lite is where the model is authored, and the wide arrangement is wanted there.
The two surfaces render the model with different renderers. Structurizr Lite lays views out itself and honours all four rank directions (tb, bt, lr, rl). structurizr-site-generatr renders by exporting each view to PlantUML, and both PlantUML exporters collapse the four directions to two: LeftRight becomes left to right direction, everything else becomes top to bottom direction.
Neither tool offers a way to set a direction per surface. There is no generatr.* property for layout; an extending workspace cannot redefine a view that already exists, only add one under a different key, which would change the view's URL on the site; and structurizr-cli export has no layout option.
One behaviour does differ between the surfaces. When a view declares no autoLayout at all, both PlantUML exporters still write top to bottom direction explicitly, so the site is top to bottom. Structurizr Lite instead treats such a view as manually laid out and restores the element positions saved in workspace.json.
The Components view declares no autoLayout. The site therefore renders it top to bottom, and Structurizr Lite renders the manual arrangement saved locally.
workspace.json stays out of version control, as decided when it was removed in May 2025.
The other component views keep their explicit autoLayout, and are unaffected.
The Components view has no layout keyword, which reads like an oversight. This record is the explanation; the DSL carries a comment pointing here.
The arrangement shown in Structurizr Lite is maintained by hand and lives only in the local workspace.json. On a fresh clone that file is absent, so the view opens with its elements stacked at the origin until someone uses the editor's auto-layout and saves the workspace. The generated site is unaffected, because the PlantUML export path never reads element positions.
The site loses the ranksep and nodesep values that an explicit autoLayout would have supplied, so PlantUML's own spacing defaults apply to this one diagram.
Reverting is a one-line change: adding autolayout tb or autolayout lr back makes both surfaces agree again, in whichever direction is chosen.