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Alberto Arena
Alberto Arena

Posted on • Originally published at albertoarena.it

I gave my schema viewer your app's colours

#laravel #database #php #opensource

Truss is a live, zoomable ER diagram of your Laravel app's actual database schema, safe to run in production because it only ever reads structure. I introduced it back in July, and it's been part of every client project since, gated behind a viewTruss policy. Two things kept nagging at me. The dashboard was always Truss blue, whatever the client's actual brand was, so it looked bolted onto their app rather than part of it. And the export button, one click for a Markdown data dictionary or a DBML file, only ever got clicked when I remembered to, so the schema file committed to the repo drifted quietly from the real one until someone noticed, usually the hard way.

Truss 1.6 fixes both: a themeable dashboard that matches whatever it's embedded in, and a truss:export command that puts the same output in your terminal and your CI pipeline, no browser required.

Match it to your app

Colours and fonts now live under truss.theme in config, and Truss re-skins itself in both light and dark mode:

// config/truss.php
'theme' => [
    'colors' => [
        'light' => [
            'accent' => '#b45309',
            'accent-secondary' => '#0f766e',
            'background' => '#faf6f0',
            'surface' => '#fffdf8',
            'text' => '#3a2a1c',
            'border' => '#c8873f',
        ],
        'dark' => [
            'accent' => '#fbbf24',
            'background' => '#1b130b',
            'surface' => '#26190d',
            'text' => '#f5e6d0',
            'border' => '#8a6428',
        ],
    ],
],
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Only the knobs you set are overridden, everything else stays on the default Blueprint palette, so three or four values are enough to make it look at home. The re-skin runs deep: the diagram's relationship lines, label backdrops, background grid, table rows, and inputs all follow, not just the toolbar chrome. It ships as a same-origin stylesheet, no build step, style-src 'self' still covers it, and a default install adds no extra request at all. Each value is validated before it's written, so a typo falls back to the default instead of breaking the sheet.

Picking hex values by hand isn't required. The new theme builder previews a palette against the real dashboard live, starts from presets (Blueprint, Ember, Contrast) if you'd rather tweak than start blank, and generates the exact config/truss.php snippet to paste in.

The Truss theme builder in light mode: colour knobs on the left, the schema diagram re-skinned in a warm amber and teal palette on the right

Get a schema file without opening a browser 

php artisan truss:export --format=dbml --output=docs/schema.dbml
php artisan truss:export --format=json --check
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truss:export is the export button's command-line counterpart: the same five formats (DBML, JSON, CSV, Markdown data dictionary, Mermaid), generated straight from PHP, no browser involved. Output is deterministic, the same schema always produces the same bytes, which is what makes --check worth running: point it at the file you've committed, and it exits 1 the moment that file stops matching the database, 2 on a usage error, 0 when everything lines up. Wire it into a commit hook or CI, and schema drift stops being something a reviewer has to notice by eye. Structure only, as always, no network call.

Try it

Update with composer update albertoarena/laravel-truss.

What's next

Lighthouse CI is next on the roadmap: automated performance and accessibility audits across both themes, light and dark. After that: more truss:doctor rules, reading Eloquent relationships for semantic labels instead of just foreign keys, and schema context formatted for AI agents working in the same codebase. If a theme knob is missing or truss:export should support a format it doesn't, open a discussion.

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