Doxide

A tool for transforming jsDoc style documentation in JavaScript files into API documentation in markdown.

Quick Access

• Installation
• Usage
• CLI
• doxyfile
• Examples
• FAQ

Installation

$ npm install --save-dev node-doxide -g

Usage

There are a few different approaches for using Doxide for your application. You can either create a doxyfile.json to define a set of files to scan and where to write the output to, or you can manually define these arguments in the command line.

$ doxide --help

Usage: doxide <command>

  Possible <commands> could be:

  doxide                             Compiles based on your doxyfile.json
  doxide --h                         Prompts the help screen
  doxide --help                      Prompts the help screen
  doxide <file>                      Compiles <file>
  doxide <directory>                 Compiles all valid files in <directory>
  doxide <file1> -o <file2>          Compiles <file1> and stores output in <file2>
  doxide <directory> -o <file>       Compiles all valid files in <directory> and stores output in <file>

Using CLI arguments

$ doxide path/to/file -o path/to/output

Using doxyfile.json

A doxyfile.json consists of a few main fields:

• targets
• output

The targets field consist of an array of files that are to be parsed by Doxide. Being an array, it can consist of a single file or multiple files. You can also include a path to a directory here, and it's important to note that the directory will include all subdirectories within.

The output field is a single string of the name of the file to write the output to. If no output destination is specified, the compiler will default to writing the output to the console.

Example of the doxyfile.json being used for Needle which parses every source file and then stores the results into a single markdown file:

{
  "targets" : [
    "./src"
  ],
  "output" : "./docs/doxide_output.md"
}

Examples

Using a doxyfile.json

$ cd root/director/with/doxyfile
$ doxide

Using the cli arguments

$ doxide main.js component.jsx router.js -o docs/output.md

[02:03:28] Attempting to fetch files
[02:03:28] Working on 3 files
[02:03:28] Cleared docs/output.md prepping for output
[02:03:28] Successfully wrote all of main.js documention from to output.md
[02:03:28] Successfully wrote all of component.jsx documention from to output.md
[02:03:28] Successfully wrote all of router.js documention from to output.md
[02:03:28] Finished after 15 ms

FAQ

Skipped over one or more comment blocks in .... due to missing fields.

While parsing through the documentation comments in a file, sometimes there hasn't been enough information provided for a particular block to be able to fill out the markdown function template. When this happens, we simply skip over that block and let you know that we've done so.

"Missing fields" could be something like a documentation block that wasn't given a function to document, but for things like a missing type definition in a param tag, we will throw an error.

Unable to access the file ./.../.....md

If you try to set your output destination to a file within a directory that doesn't yet exist, we'll throw an error. Sending the output to a non existent file is fine, so long as we can get there. The directory must first exist.

License

MIT

Copyright (c) 2015-Present Nick Zuber