Support & documentation

Everything you need to run Aurora Diagrams — plus how to reach a human.

Getting help

Email support@auroramakers.com. That address reaches the person who builds the app — there is no ticket queue and no bot in between.

What to include in a report

• Your Jira site URL — e.g. yourcompany.atlassian.net.
• Browser and version — e.g. Chrome 140, Safari 18, Firefox 141.
• What you did — the steps, in order, that led to the problem.
• What happened — including the exact error text if one appeared.
• A screenshot — of the panel, the workspace, or the error.

Aurora Diagrams sends nothing to us, so we have no logs, no telemetry and no copy of your diagram to look at. Your description is genuinely all we have — the more concrete it is, the better.

Getting started

1. Install from the Atlassian Marketplace. A Jira site administrator installs Aurora Diagrams for the site. It installs as a Forge app — no external service to sign up for, no account to create, no API key to paste.
2. Open any Jira issue and scroll to the Aurora Diagrams panel. Every issue gets one. Diagrams created here belong to that issue and travel with it.
3. Or open the full workspace at Jira → Apps → Aurora Diagrams. Same editor, full browser width, plus the list of diagrams across your site.
4. Create a diagram from one of the 8 templates — Flowchart, Org chart, Mind map, SWOT, Sprint retrospective, System architecture, User journey, Kanban — or start from a blank canvas.
5. Draw. Changes autosave to Forge storage in your own Atlassian site as you work. There is no Save button to remember and nothing to lose if you close the tab.

Editor basics

Adding shapes

Pick a shape in the left rail, then click on the canvas to place it. Or double-click empty canvas to drop the current shape straight down. Available shapes: rounded rectangle, rectangle, ellipse, diamond, parallelogram, hexagon, cylinder, triangle, cloud, actor, note, sticky and plain text.

Connecting shapes

Hover a shape and four small edge dots appear — top, right, bottom, left. Drag from one of them onto another shape to create a connector between the two. Connectors stay attached: move either shape and the line re-routes itself.

Drop the drag on empty canvas instead and Aurora Diagrams creates a new shape of the same kind, already connected. That is the fastest way to build a flowchart — drag, drop, type, repeat.

Connectors support orthogonal, straight and curved routing, with arrowheads on either or both ends.

Editing, moving, selecting

• Edit text: double-click a shape or a connector and type. Press Escape or click away to commit.
• Move: drag a shape. Snapping and alignment guides appear as you approach the edges and centres of nearby shapes.
• Resize: select a shape and drag one of its corner or side handles.
• Marquee select: drag on empty canvas to rubber-band a group of shapes, then move, style or delete them together.
• Pan: hold Space and drag, or drag with the middle mouse button. The H tool does the same thing without a modifier.
• Zoom: ⌘/Ctrl + scroll, or the zoom controls. ⌘0 fits the whole diagram in view.
• Auto-arrange: one click lays out the current diagram on a clean automatic grid — useful after importing text or after a messy brainstorm.
• Undo/redo: unlimited within a session; see the shortcut table below.

Keyboard shortcuts

macOS shortcuts are shown with ⌘; on Windows and Linux use Ctrl unless noted.

Themes

Aurora Diagrams ships 5 one-click diagram themes that restyle an entire diagram at once:

• Aurora — the indigo/violet/cyan default.
• Graphite — neutral greys for documentation and print.
• Ocean — cool blues and teals.
• Sunset — warm ambers, corals and rose.
• Blueprint — technical, high-contrast line work.

Separately from diagram themes, the app itself has genuine light and dark modes that follow your Jira theme — not a dark canvas with a light editor bolted on. Change the Jira theme and Aurora Diagrams follows.

Text to diagram

Type a Mermaid-style flowchart definition and Aurora Diagrams builds it as real, editable shapes with automatic layout — not a picture. Once generated, everything can be moved, restyled, connected and exported like anything else you drew by hand.

A complete example

%% Deployment gate
graph TD
  A[Open pull request] --> B{CI green?}
  B -->|Yes| C(Review)
  B -->|No| D[/Fix build/]
  D --> A
  C --> E[(Deploy log)]
  E --> F((Done))

Headers

Start with a direction header. graph TD lays the diagram out top-down; graph LR lays it out left-to-right. flowchart works as a synonym for graph.

Node shapes

The letter before the bracket is the node's id — use it to refer to the same node again later. Text inside the brackets is the label that appears in the shape.

Edges

What is skipped

Aurora Diagrams supports a deliberate subset of Mermaid. Lines it does not implement — subgraph / end blocks, style, classDef, class, click and similar styling directives — are skipped silently rather than treated as errors. Paste a diagram from elsewhere and you get everything that is supported, instead of a failure message. Nodes declared inside a subgraph still appear; only the grouping box is dropped.

Version history & visual diff

1. Save a version at any point worth returning to — before a big restructure, after a review, at the end of a workshop. Give it a name so it means something later.
2. Compare any version against the current diagram, or against another version. The diff is visual: you see the diagram, with changes highlighted on the shapes themselves — green for added, amber for changed, red for removed. No JSON to read, no side-by-side squinting.
3. Restore any version with one click. Restoring is itself an undoable step, so trying an old version is safe.

Export

• PNG (2×) — a raster image at double resolution, so it stays crisp on high-DPI screens and when pasted into a Confluence page, a slide deck or a Jira comment.
• SVG — vector, scales infinitely, ideal for documentation sites and print.
• JSON — the lossless format. It contains every shape, connector, label, style and position exactly as stored. Use JSON to re-import a diagram into another issue or site, to keep an off-site backup, or to move a diagram between Jira instances.

Exports are generated in your browser. Nothing is uploaded anywhere to produce them.

Troubleshooting

Privacy & security in brief

Aurora Diagrams runs entirely on Atlassian's infrastructure. It is eligible for the Runs on Atlassian programme, confirmed by the Forge CLI at deploy time.

• Zero egress. The app makes no external network calls whatsoever — no APIs, no CDNs, no fonts, no analytics endpoints.
• Your data stays in your site. Every diagram is stored in Forge storage inside your own Atlassian site.
• Aurora Makers operates no servers, receives no customer data, and has no ability to access your diagrams.
• No analytics, no tracking, no cookies.
• One scope: storage:app. That is the complete list of permissions the app requests — it cannot read your issues, your users or your projects.

Full details in the privacy policy, with the legal terms in the terms of service.