If we want to know which version of PlantUML we are using we can use the command line option -version. PlantUML will print the version and also some extra information like the machine name, memory and more. But we can also create a PlantUML definition with the command version and we can transform it to a graphical presentation like a PNG image. This can be handy if we use PlantUML in an environment like Asciidoctor with diagram support and we want to know which version of PlantUML is used.

In our first example we run PlantUML from the command line and use the -version option:

$ plantuml -version
PlantUML version 8051 (Thu Dec 01 18:52:05 CET 2016)
(GPL source distribution)
Java Runtime: Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment
JVM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM
Java Version: 1.8.0_112-b16
Operating System: Mac OS X
OS Version: 10.12.1
Default Encoding: UTF-8
Language: en
Country: US
Machine: mrhaki-laptop-2015.fritz.box
PLANTUML_LIMIT_SIZE: 4096
Processors: 8
Max Memory: 3,817,865,216
Total Memory: 257,425,408
Free Memory: 249,050,832
Used Memory: 8,374,576
Thread Active Count: 2

The environment variable GRAPHVIZ_DOT has been set to /usr/local/bin/dot
Dot executable is /usr/local/bin/dot
Dot version: dot - graphviz version 2.38.0 (20140413.2041)
Installation seems OK. File generation OK
$

In the second example we create a file with the following PlantUML definition:

@startuml
version
@enduml

When we generate a PNG from this definition we get the following result:

Written with PlantUML 8051.

Original blog post