typedoc VS docsify

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.

📂 GitHub Repository 🌐 Website

Docsify is frequently updated; the latest release was on June 24, 2023, and the most recent update was on December 17, 2023. It is MIT-licensed and has an active Discord community.

okay new plan, does anyone know how to do this docsify on github? i obviously am a noob on github and recently on reddit. I'd like to help where i can but my knowlegde seems to be my handycap. i could provide you a trash-mail, if you need one, but i need a PO (product owner) to manage the git... i have no clue about this yet (pages and functions and stuff)

The tools to author it aren't that important, frankly. Ask your audience what they're most comfortable using and try to meet them there.

If the stakeholders are technical, you have more options. If they aren't, I hope you like Google Docs or Word, because if you give them anything other than that or a PDF, they'll probably complain. At worst, yeah, write it in a long Markdown text file and use tools like pandoc to transform that into other formats as needed.

If you do need a website and you're not generating enterprise-scale amounts of content (and it sounds like you're not) try things that let you avoid needing build steps and infrastructure if at all possible, so you can iterate and deploy changes with as little friction as you can.

Tools like Docsify[1] can take a pile of Markdown files and serve a site out of them, client- or server-side, without a static build step. Depending on the org, you can get away with GitHub's default rendering of Markdown in a repo. Most static site builds for stuff your scale are overengineered instances of premature optimization.

Past those initial hurdles, the format and tools challenges are all in maintenance. How can you:

- most easily keep the content up to date

- delegate updates as the staff grows or changes

- proactively distribute updates ASAP to the people who'd most benefit from receiving them

That's going to depend a lot more on who'll contribute updates, what their technical proficiency's like, and how they prefer to communicate. It might be a shared git repo and RSS or Slack notifications if they're comfortable with those things, and it might be a Google Doc and email if they're like most non-technical stakeholders.

1: https://docsify.js.org

Big fan of https://docsify.js.org since theres no need to compile your static site. A small amount of js just renders markdown.

If you are searching for examples of an arbitrary Jellyfin support site, visit https://travisflix.com/help/#/support (or help.travisflix.com which redirects to the /help/ URI of the TLD) to take a look at what I have done with docsify on Github Pages.

*Leantime - Competitor to OP? Updated recently, uses Docsify, no demo :(