documentation

The documentation system for modern JavaScript

:date: Current maintenance status

• Supports modern JavaScript: ES5, ES2017, JSX, Vue and Flow type annotations.
• Infers parameters, types, membership, and more. Write less documentation: let the computer write it for you.
• Integrates with GitHub to link directly from documentation to the code it refers to.
• Customizable output: HTML, JSON, Markdown, and more

Examples

• HTML output with default template
• Markdown
• JSON

Documentation

• Getting Started: start here
• Usage: how to use documentation.js
• Recipes: tricks for writing effective JSDoc docs
• Node API: documentation.js's self-generated documentation
• Configuring documentation.js
• FAQ
• Troubleshooting
• Theming: tips for theming documentation output in HTML
• See also: a list of projects similar to documentation.js

User Guide

Globally install documentation using the npm package manager:

$ npm install -g documentation

This installs a command called documentation in your path, that you can point at JSDoc-annotated source code to generate human-readable documentation. First, run documentation with the --help option for help:

Usage:

# generate markdown docs for index.js and files it references
documentation build index.js -f md

# generate html docs for all files in src, and include links to source files in github
documentation build src/** -f html --github -o docs

# document index.js, ignoring any files it requires or imports
documentation build index.js -f md --shallow

# validate JSDoc syntax in util.js
documentation lint util.js

# update the API section of README.md with docs from index.js
documentation readme index.js --section=API

# build docs for all values exported by index.js
documentation build --document-exported index.js

# build html docs for a TypeScript project
documentation build index.ts --parse-extension ts -f html -o docs

Commands:
  build [input..]   build documentation
  lint [input..]    check for common style and uniformity mistakes
  readme [input..]  inject documentation into your README.md

Options:
  --version  Show version number                                       [boolean]
  --help     Show help                                                 [boolean]

Contributing

We have plenty of issues that we'd love help with.

• Robust and complete JSDoc support, including typedefs.
• Strong support for HTML and Markdown output
• Documentation coverage, statistics, and validation

documentation is an OPEN Open Source Project. This means that:

Individuals making significant and valuable contributions are given commit-access to the project to contribute as they see fit. This project is more like an open wiki than a standard guarded open source project.

Changelog

14.0.3 (2024-01-30)

Bug Fixes

• exported: respect parse-extension & require-extension (#1484) (798fa10), closes #1272 #1258
• fix GFM markdown output (#1553) (1cc2f98)