typedoc

What is typedoc?

TypeDoc is a documentation generator for TypeScript projects. It reads your TypeScript source code and its comments and produces an HTML documentation website. It is capable of creating readable and user-friendly documentation for TypeScript projects, which can be very helpful for both maintaining internal code and for sharing code with external users.

What are typedoc's main functionalities?

Generating Documentation

This command generates documentation for the TypeScript source files located in the 'src' directory and outputs the result to the 'docs' directory.

typedoc --out docs src

Customizing the Theme

This command generates documentation with a minimal theme, which is one of the built-in themes provided by TypeDoc.

typedoc --out docs src --theme minimal

Excluding Private Members

This command generates documentation while excluding private members from the output, making the documentation cleaner if private members are not intended to be part of the public API.

typedoc --out docs src --excludePrivate

Including Declaration Files

This command includes type declaration files (d.ts files) in the documentation generation process, which can be useful for documenting the types that are part of the project's external API.

typedoc --out docs src --includeDeclarations

Other packages similar to typedoc

jsdoc

JSDoc is a popular documentation generator for JavaScript. It uses comments in the source code to generate comprehensive documentation. While similar in purpose to TypeDoc, JSDoc is tailored for JavaScript and requires additional plugins to work well with TypeScript.

esdoc

ESDoc is another documentation generator for JavaScript, with support for ES6+ syntax. It provides features like coverage reporting and integrated test codes in the documentation. ESDoc is not as TypeScript-focused as TypeDoc and may require additional configuration for TypeScript projects.

README

TypeDoc

Documentation generator for TypeScript projects.

Documentation

For more detailed documentation, the changelog, and TypeDoc documentation rendered with TypeDoc, see https://typedoc.org.

Installation

TypeDoc runs on Node.js and is available as a NPM package.

npm install typedoc --save-dev

Usage

To generate documentation TypeDoc needs to know your project entry point, and TypeScript compiler options. It will automatically try to find your tsconfig.json file, so you can just specify the entry point of your library:

typedoc src/index.ts

If you have multiple entry points, specify each of them.

typedoc package1/index.ts package2/index.ts

If you specify a directory, TypeDoc will use the entryPointStrategy option to determine how to resolve it. By default, TypeDoc will search for a file called index under the directory.

Monorepos / Workspaces

If your codebase is comprised of one or more npm packages, you can pass the paths to these packages and TypeDoc will attempt to determine entry points based on package.json's main property (with default value index.js) and if it wasn't found, based on types property. If any of the packages given are the root of an npm Workspace or a Yarn Workspace TypeDoc will find all the workspaces defined in the package.json. In order to find your entry points, TypeDoc requires either that you turn on sourcemaps so that it can discover the original TS file, or that you specify "typedocMain": "src/index.ts" to explicitly state where the package entry point is. Supports wildcard paths in the same fashion as those found in npm or Yarn workspaces.

Single npm module

typedoc --entryPointStrategy packages .

Monorepo with npm/Yarn workspace at the root

typedoc --entryPointStrategy packages .

Monorepo with manually specified sub-packages to document

This can be useful if you do not want all your workspaces to be processed. Accepts the same paths as would go in the package.json's workspaces

# Note the single quotes prevent shell wildcard expansion, allowing typedoc to do the expansion
typedoc --entryPointStrategy packages a-package 'some-more-packages/*' 'some-other-packages/*'

Arguments

For a complete list of the command line arguments run typedoc --help or visit our website.

• --out <path/to/documentation/>
  Specifies the location the documentation should be written to. Defaults to ./docs
• --json <path/to/output.json>
  Specifies the location and file name a json file describing the project is written to. When specified no documentation will be generated unless --out is also specified.
• --options
  Specify a json option file that should be loaded. If not specified TypeDoc will look for 'typedoc.json' in the current directory.
• --tsconfig <path/to/tsconfig.json>
  Specify a typescript config file that should be loaded. If not specified TypeDoc will look for 'tsconfig.json' in the current directory.
• --exclude <pattern>
  Exclude files by the given pattern when a path is provided as source. Supports standard minimatch patterns.

Theming

• --theme <default|plugin defined theme>
  Specify the theme that should be used.
• --name <Documentation title>
  Set the name of the project that will be used in the header of the template.
• --readme <path/to/readme|none>
  Path to the readme file that should be displayed on the index page. Pass none to disable the index page and start the documentation on the globals page.

Miscellaneous

• --version
  Display the version number of TypeDoc.
• --help
  Display all TypeDoc options.

Contributing

This project is maintained by a community of developers. Contributions are welcome and appreciated. You can find TypeDoc on GitHub; feel free to open an issue or create a pull request: https://github.com/TypeStrong/typedoc

For more information, read the contribution guide.