documentation

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 babel, we have support for a wide range of ES6 & ES7 features, as well as Flow type annotations.

Powerful inference

By statically analyzing your JavaScript code, documentation.js can write many parts of your documentation for you. It can infer parameter names and types, class membership, return values from Flow types, and lots more.

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: 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:
  --lint             check output for common style and uniformity mistakes
                                                                       [boolean]
  -t, --theme        specify a theme: this must be a valid theme module
  -p, --private      generate documentation tagged as private          [boolean]
  --version          Show version number                               [boolean]
  --name             project name. by default, inferred from package.json
  --project-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)       [boolean] [default: false]
  --polyglot         polyglot mode turns off dependency resolution and enables
                     multi-language support. use this to document c++  [boolean]
  -g, --github       infer links to github in documentation            [boolean]
  -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                                         [boolean]
  -f, --format                 [choices: "json", "md", "html"] [default: "json"]

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

4.0.0-beta

Revitalized documentation.js command line interface!

The documentation utility now takes commands:

• documentation build extracts and formats documentation
• documentation serve provides an auto-reloading server (#236)
• documentation lint reviews files for inconsistencies
• documentation readme patches API documentation into a readme (#313 by @anandthakker)

This functionality was previously included in dev-documentation and has been folded into documentation proper.

Much more flexible themes

Themes are now much more customizable. In documentation.js 3.x and before, themes were required to use Handlebars templates and produce a single page. In documentation.js 4.x and beyond, they are JavaScript modules that can use any template engine and produce any number of files. See the new theme documentation for details.

More precise traversal

Inference in 4.x is stricter than in 3.x: comments must be adjacent to the statements they document. This should make documentation generation much more predictable.

Support for the revealing module pattern

/** Foo */
function Foo() {
  /** Test */
  function bar() {}
  return {
    bar: bar
  };
}

New support for the JavaScript module pattern! This was implemented in #324 by Charlie Brown.

Breaking changes

• documentation.js now follows the JSDoc standard's interpretation of the @name tag: specifying a name tag will turn off inference. If you still want inference but want to call code something else, use the @alias tag instead.