rst2nitrile VS instaunit

Last week I ported my static physical book building tooling from rst-based [0] to markdown (pandoc filter) based.

I've used my rst tooling to publish many books (like Effective Pandas) and am wanting to drop rst in an effort to simplify my life. My pandoc toolchain is not in github yet, but preliminary exploration validates that I can publish my next physical book with it (with things like front matter, indices, etc).

In the process I messed around with MyST and mistletoe. I dropped MyST because it was evident I would need to mess around with Sphinx again. Been there done that. Too much abstraction.

Mistletoe would have worked too (I need to create custom fences/markup for a few features) but I wanted to see if I could do it with Pandoc.

The Pandoc distinction between Blocks and Inlines is annoying as is the requirement to handle everything at once. With Pandoc, you only get notified at the start of an element, not the end which probably complicates it a bit more than Mistletoe would have.

(I still need to port my slide generation tooling and will probably use mistletoe for that. For epub generation I think I will stick with Pandoc.)

0 - https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2nitrile

Shameless plug: for REST APIs, I've written a tool called Instaunit which combines HTTP API integration tests with documentation generation, since these two things must always be maintained in lockstep.

It's got a ways to go before it generates output that looks as good as Stripe's documentation, but it makes it dead simple to create API documentation that's guaranteed to be in sync with your service, because it was generated by your tests when they ran.

https://github.com/instaunit/instaunit

Check out https://github.com/instaunit/instaunit. It lets you define the calls to be made and expected responses and will compare them semantically so you can match on expected fields without worrying about things like dates and IDs that you can't predict easily. It can also be used to generate documentation for your APIs which is awesome because your docs are then built from your tests so you know they are current and accurate.