styledocco

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StyleDocco generates documentation and style guide documents from your stylesheets.

Stylesheet comments will be parsed through Markdown and displayed in a generated HTML document. You can write code examples prefixed with 4 spaces (or between ```, GitHub code fences) in your comments, and StyleDocco both renders the HTML and shows the code example.

An important philosophy of StyleDocco is to introduce as little custom syntax as possible, maintaining the stylesheet comments readable and useful even without StyleDocco.

The document is automatically split into new sections when it encounters a level 1 or 2 heading. Read more about the heading syntax in the Markdown guide. Only comments at the beginning of new lines are included, put some whitespace before a comment to exlude it from the style guide.

Suggestions, feature requests and bug reports are very welcome, either at GitHub or on Twitter (@jacobrask).

Installation

StyleDocco requires Node.js. When you have Node.js installed, run

npm install -g styledocco

or clone the GitHub repository.

StyleDocco is free software, released under the MIT license.

Usage

styledocco [options] [INPUT]

StyleDocco will automatically compile any SASS, SCSS, Less or Stylus files before they are applied to the page. You can also enter a custom preprocessor command if you want to pass custom parameters to the preprocessor.

If your project includes a README file, it will be used as the base for an index.html. StyleDocco will also add some default styles to your documentation, but they are easy to modify to make it fit with your project.

Options

• --name, -n Name of the project (required)
• --out, -o Output directory (default: "docs")
• --tmpl Directory for custom docs.jade template and docs.css (optional)
• --overwrite Overwrite existing files (docs.css) in target directory. (default: false)
• --preprocessor Custom preprocessor command. (optional) (ex: --preprocessor "scss --load-path=deps/")

Usage examples

Generate documentation for My Project in the docs folder, from the files in the css directory.

styledocco -n "My Project" css

Generate documentation for My Project in the mydocs folder, from source files in the styles folder. Use the Less binary in ~/bin/lessc.

styledocco -n "My Project" -o mydocs --preprocessor "~/bin/lessc" styles

Syntax examples

Stylesheet

/*
    <button class="btn primary">Primary</button>
Provides extra visual weight and identifies the primary action in a set of buttons. */
.btn.primary {
    background: steelblue;
    color: snow;
    border: 1px solid steelblue;
}

.btn.primary { background: steelblue; color: snow; border: 2px outset steelblue; }</style>

Output

Provides extra visual weight and identifies the primary action in a set of buttons.

<button class="btn primary">Primary</button>

This page is an example itself, as it was generated from the StyleDocco readme file. The docs file is the documentation of the default StyleDocco CSS file.

An additional example was generated from a modified file of the Twitter Bootstrap project.

Acknowledgements

A lot of the heavy lifting in StyleDocco is done by the excellent Marked module by Christopher Jeffrey. The original Docco by Jeremy Ashkenas and Docco Husky by Mike Brevoort were also of great help to this project. Knyle Style Sheets is a similar project written in Ruby, and has also been an inspiration to StyleDocco.