jsx-readme VS typedoc

Maintaining open source is a noble, but can be time-consuming endeavor. It doesn't have to be, though. During Hacktoberfest 2020 I used one of my repositories to experiment with automation around contribution and maintenance of jsx-readme. This is what I learned.

The best way to understand the result of the script above is to just look at the package itself - jsx-readme uses it to create its own README.

Documentation generation from your compiled .d.ts with typedoc

JavaScript (TypeScript) ecosystem has various types of API docs generators. Maybe the most popular one is TypeDoc. While generating API docs itself is easy, hosting API docs is pretty hard. Publishing generated HTML to static hosting service like GitHub Pages is the method I adopted previously, but it's not an ideal solution because we can't view docs for older versions.

Firstly, install Typedoc using npm:

Background:The main bottleneck with the TypeDoc default theme especially for large projects is the verbose HTML for the left-hand navigation that linearly grows for each page based on the project size and consumes a massive amount of disk space; see this TypeDoc issue. The DMT caches the left-hand navigation HTML and dynamically creates a shared web component that is utilized across all pages only making a single copy of the navigation HTML. This reduces disk space utilization by up to 90% and also makes doc generation ~80% faster. I also include some style additions and replace the main search index generation using compressed MesssagePack instead of JSON which reduces the search index size by more than 90%.

While the Prim+RPC server is expected to be JavaScript, I'd like to support other languages through JSON Schema. I wrote a tool that translates TypeDoc comments into RPC-specific documentation. My plan is to turn this result into JSON Schema that can be served with the Prim+RPC server. This means you can get typed suggestions (for instance, from an IDE that understands JSON Schema) when writing requests in JSON files (I wrote a little about this here, still a WIP). From this, you could use your favorite HTTP client in the language of your choice, like but still benefit from having typed requests.

Docusaurus has a Typedoc plugin. Also there is a typedoc markdown plugin.

Finally, JSDoc can be used to generate documentation for your code using tools like JSDoc itself and TypeDoc. These tools generate HTML or Markdown documentation based on your JSDoc annotations, making it easier for others to understand how your code works and how to use it.

Since you're using TypeScript, use TypeDoc.