If you ship anything for a living — diagrams, infrastructure, docs, slide decks — you have probably noticed that each of those things lives in its own world, with its own toolchain, its own opinionated editor, and its own subtle ways to drift out of sync.

Dinghy is an open-source toolchain that puts all of them under one roof. One CLI. One install. One consistent way to describe what you want as code and let the tools deliver the final artwork.

What it is

A Swiss-army knife for engineers who like writing code more than clicking through dialogs:

• Diagram as Code — render architecture diagrams to draw.io.
• Infrastructure as Code — render OpenTofu / Terraform from React TSX.
• Site Builder — author docs sites with Docusaurus, live-preview them, deploy to S3.
• Slide Builder — author RevealJS presentations in YAML / Markdown / HTML, with Prezi-style zoom-and-pan as a Dinghy-exclusive bonus.

It is powered by Deno and Docker, so you do not need to babysit Node versions, Python virtualenvs, Terraform providers, or any of the rest of it.

From a DevOps engineer's bench

Dinghy was built by a DevOps engineer, so it is shaped to walk with your code across the whole software development lifecycle — from local development through to CI/CD — instead of stopping at the edge of one stage.

How it is shaped

Dinghy splits cleanly into a thin CLI and a fat engine that runs in Docker. The CLI is what you install on your machine; the engine is a versioned image that ships every dependency Dinghy needs.

curl -fsSL https://get.dinghy.dev/install.sh | sh

That single command gets you the CLI. From then on, everything Dinghy does happens inside the engine image — which means every machine on your team gets the exact same versions of Deno, Node, OpenTofu / Terraform, and every TF provider, pinned through a single .dinghyrc file.

DINGHY_ENGINE_VERSION=0.1...

One lock. Predictable versions. No more "it works on my laptop" — and no more two-year-old projects you can't rebuild because the dependencies have rotted away.

Who it's for

Anyone who needs to write code for any of this work — a diagram, a piece of infrastructure, a docs site or web app, a slide deck. You do not need to use them all, and you do not need to use them all the time. Reach for one when that is all you need; pull in a few when the work spans more than one.

If any of that sounds useful for what you are building, the rest of this series digs into each capability one post at a time (coming soon — links will go live as each post is published):

1. Why React for IaC? — the origin of the Dinghy project and core concept.
2. Diagram as Code — author architecture diagrams as TSX components.
3. Infrastructure as Code — 248 lines of Terraform from 8 lines of source.
4. Site Builder — from one Markdown file to a deployed site.
5. Slide Builder — RevealJS in YAML, with Prezi-style zoom.
6. Dinghy in the AI age — still relevant? How it works alongside AI.

Ready to set sail?

curl -fsSL https://get.dinghy.dev/install.sh | sh

Guides and examples are at https://dinghy.dev.