documentation

What is documentation?

The 'documentation' package is a tool for generating documentation from JavaScript code. It supports various output formats and can be integrated into build processes to automate the creation of documentation.

What are documentation's main functionalities?

Generate HTML Documentation

This command generates HTML documentation from the JavaScript files located in the 'src' directory and outputs it to the 'docs' directory. It is useful for creating a visually accessible format of your code's documentation.

documentation build src/** -f html -o docs

Generate Markdown Documentation

This command generates Markdown documentation from the JavaScript files in the 'src' directory and outputs it to a single 'docs.md' file. Markdown is a versatile format that can be easily shared and integrated with various platforms.

documentation build src/** -f md -o docs.md

Serve Documentation Locally

This command starts a local server to serve the documentation generated from the JavaScript files in the 'src' directory. It allows developers to view and interact with the documentation in a web browser during development.

documentation serve src/**

Generate JSON Documentation

This command generates JSON documentation from the JavaScript files in the 'src' directory and outputs it to a 'docs.json' file. JSON format is useful for further processing or integration with other tools.

documentation build src/** -f json -o docs.json

Other packages similar to documentation

jsdoc

JSDoc is a popular tool for generating documentation from JavaScript source code. It is similar to 'documentation' in that it parses comments in the code to produce documentation. However, JSDoc is more widely used and has a larger community, which can be beneficial for support and finding resources.

typedoc

TypeDoc is a documentation generator specifically for TypeScript projects. It is similar to 'documentation' but is tailored for TypeScript, providing better support for TypeScript-specific features. It is a good choice if you are working primarily with TypeScript.

esdoc

ESDoc is a documentation generator for ECMAScript, similar to 'documentation'. It offers features like test coverage and linting for documentation comments. ESDoc is particularly focused on ES6 and beyond, making it a good choice for modern JavaScript projects.

README

documentation

A documentation generation system that's beautiful by default, flexible across formats and styles, and powerful enough to support JSDoc's advanced syntax.

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 C++

You can use the --polyglot mode of documentationjs to document native node.js modules in JSDoc within the C++ code that implements the feature.

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.

Gulp integration

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

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

• FAQ

• Theming HTML: 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 -h option for help:

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

Options:
  -f, --format   output format, of [json, md, html]            [default: "json"]
  --lint         check output for common style and uniformity mistakes          
  -t, --theme    specify a theme: this must be a valid theme module             
  -p, --private  generate documentation tagged as private                       
  --name         project name. by default, inferred from package.json           
  --version      project version. by default, inferred from package.json        
  --shallow      shallow mode turns off dependency resolution, only processing
                 the specified files (or the main script specified in
                 package.json)                                  [default: false]
  --polyglot     polyglot mode turns off dependency resolution and enables
                 multi-language support. use this to document c++               
  -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"]
  -c, --config   configuration file. an array defining explicit sort order      
  -h, --help     Show help                                                      

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

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

3.0.0

The largest change to documentation.js so far.

Dropping streams

This a major refactor of the documentation.js interface with a focus on simplifying the system. Up until this point, documentation.js was built around node.js streams, which are low-level representations of asynchronous series of data. While this abstraction was appropriate for the input and github streams, which are asynchronous, the majority of documentation.js's internals are simple and synchronous functions for which basic functional composition makes more sense than stream semantics.

Documentation 3.0.0 uses simple functional composition for operations like parmameter inference, rather than streams.

Stronger support for ES6, ES7, and Flow

We've switched to Babel as our source code parser, which means that we have much broader support of new JavaScript features, including import/export syntax and new features in ES6.

Babel also parses Flow type annotations, and new inference code means that we can infer

• Parameter names & types
• Return types

Without any explicit JSDoc tags. This means that for many simple functions, we can generate great documentation with less writing.

Stronger module support

Documentation.js now has much better inference for membership and names of symbols exported via exports or module.exports.

Support for nested symbols

The parent/child relationship between symbols is now fully hierarchical, and symbols can be nested to any depth. For instance:

/**
 * A global Parent class.
 */
var Parent = function () {};

/**
 * A Child class.
 */
Parent.Child = function () {};

/**
 * A Grandchild class.
 */
Parent.Child.Grandchild = function () {};

In addition, filtering by access is now applied to the entire hierarchy: if you mark a class as @private, neither it nor its children will be included in the output by default, regardless of the access specifiers of the children.

mdast-based Markdown output

We've switched from templating Markdown output with Handlebars.js to generating an abstract syntax tree of desired output and stringifying it with mdast. This lets documentation.js output complex Markdown without having to worry about escaping and properly formatting certain elements.

Test coverage 100%

documentation.js returns to 100% test coverage, so every single line of code is covered by our large library of text fixtures and specific tests.

--lint mode

Specifying the --lint flag makes documentation.js check for non-standard types, like String, or missing namespaces. If the encountered files have any problems, it pretty-prints helpful debug messages and exits with status 1, and otherwise exits with no output and status 0.

Breaking changes

• The --version flag is now --project-version. --version now outputs documentation.js's version