documentation

documentation

This would be a big one, we would need the whole town to pitch in.

The mission is to create a documentation generation system that's beautiful by default, flexible across formats and styles, and powerful enough to support JSDoc's advanced syntax.

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

Completed Goals

ES5 and ES6 support of JavaScript, with support for other transpilers a possibility

Using espree, we have support for a wide range of ES6 features.

Support for following dependency trees

Using module-deps, documentation can crawl require() graphs - pointing it to your app's main file will find all referenced files and include all of their documentation.

GitHub Integration

The --github option automatically permalinks documentation to the exact sections of code it refers to in a GitHub repository.

Dash Support

The -f docset output option creates documentation compatible with the excellent Dash documentation tool.

Gulp integration

The gulp-documentation project lets you run documentation as a Gulp build task.

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 -h option for help:

$ documentation -h
Usage: documentation <command> [options]

Options:
  -f, --format   output format, of [json, md, html, docset]    [default: "json"]
  --lint         check output for common style and uniformity mistakes
  --mdtemplate   markdown template: should be a file with Handlebars syntax
  -p, --private  generate documentation tagged as private
  -g, --github   infer links to github in documentation
  -o, --output   output location. omit for stdout, otherwise is a filename for
                 single-file outputs and a directory name for multi-file
                 outputs like html                           [default: "stdout"]
  -h, --help     Show help

Examples:
  documentation foo.js    parse documentation in a given file

Future Goals

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

Contributing

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

1.3.0

• Now infers name from class and event tags
• Support for documenting C++ code with the polyglot option and --polyglot CLI option
• Fixed github linking
• Support for JSDoc3-style bracketed optional parameters, like

/**
 * @param {Type} [param=defaultValue]
 */