documentation.js 4 beta

Announcing documentation.js 4.0.0 beta! This version aims to stablize new features. The most noticable change will be the expanded and improved CLI commands:

• documentation build extracts and formats documentation
• documentation serve provides an auto-reloading server
• documentation lint reviews files for inconsistencies
• documentation readme patches API documentation into a readme

documentation serve and documentation readme used to be a separate modules: dev-documentation and Anand Thakker’s documentation-readme. After finishing these modules, we realized that they were essential to using documentation.js and could be implemented more cleanly as part of the core, so we’re launching documentation.js as a multifunctional tool.

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

There’s new support for the JavaScript module pattern, implemented by Charlie Brown.

Try it out

You can install documentation as a CLI tool, or a dependency of your node.js module: it’s available on npm as the documentation module, and on GitHub under documentationjs/documentation.