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 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; see Build a Local Version for a preview of your changes.
-
to maintain structure, content and help for the template
-
to keep non-asciidoc, non-generable formats (like Sparx® Enterprise-Architect® EAP) in
other-formats/.
In case you find issues within the template or its explanations, this is the repo to fix and issue pull requests :-)
-
November 2025: first Chinese version
-
9.0: July 2025:
-
Clarified and re-structured section 10 (Quality Requirements) to include overview (10.1) and details (10.2).
-
Unified concept-image in section 8.
-
Unified usage of revision number by adding version.properties file to every language.
-
Reworked the local build to facilitate translations
-
-
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 downloads are published as GitHub Releases of this repository, built by the arc42-generator (make release). Every release contains all languages, styles (plain, with help) and formats, plus a