wirequill

Your API documents itself.

WireQuill watches real HTTP traffic and turns it into live OpenAPI documentation. Open source, local-first, no account, no cloud.

npx wirequill --target http://localhost:8080

Then:

1. Point your app's API base URL at http://127.0.0.1:3000
2. Use your app normally
3. Open http://127.0.0.1:3001

WireQuill sees your traffic because your client sends it through WireQuill's local proxy, which forwards every request to your backend unchanged. The documentation page starts empty and fills in as you click around — no reload.

What you get

• Endpoint discovery: /users/1 and /users/2 become GET /users/{userId}
• Request and response schema inference from real payloads
• A valid OpenAPI 3.1 document at http://127.0.0.1:3001/openapi.json
• Live documentation that updates while you use your app
• Secret redaction before anything reaches disk

Requirements

Node.js 24 or newer. Nothing is compiled at install time: WireQuill uses Node's own node:sqlite, so there is no node-gyp, no Python and no build toolchain.

Usage

wirequill --target <url>

  --target <url>        Upstream backend URL, for example http://localhost:8080
  --port <number>       Proxy port (default: 3000)
  --docs-port <number>  Documentation server port (default: 3001)
  --host <host>         Proxy host (default: 127.0.0.1)
  --max-body <bytes>    Per-body capture limit in bytes
  --no-open             Do not open the documentation in a browser
  --insecure            Disable TLS certificate verification for the target
  --verbose             Print diagnostic metadata (never bodies or secrets)
  --config <path>       Path to wirequill.config.json
  --db <path>           SQLite database path

Local by default

Observed traffic stays on your machine. There is no account, no telemetry and no cloud component, and the documentation page makes no external request of any kind — no fonts, no analytics, no assistant.

The documentation server binds 127.0.0.1 and cannot be moved off it. --host opens the proxy to your network; it never opens the docs.

Common secrets are redacted before anything is written to disk. Automatic redaction is best effort — review generated documentation before sharing it.

What WireQuill is not

Not an API gateway, a monitoring service or a test runner. A development-time documentation tool that happens to sit in the request path.

License

Apache License 2.0. See the LICENSE and NOTICE files included in this package.