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Top 23 Documentation Open-Source Projects
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storybook
Storybook is the industry standard workshop for building, documenting, and testing UI components in isolation
Project mention: 7 Free Tools and Resources for Building Well-Structured React Applications | dev.to | 2026-05-07Storybook is a tool for developing and documenting UI components in isolation. You write stories that render individual components with specific props, and Storybook displays them in a standalone browser environment that is separate from the main application. The v8 release significantly reduced configuration complexity, making it practical to add to an existing project without a major setup investment.
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mermaid
Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text in a similar manner as markdown
In milestones 3 and 4 I implemented the React whiteboard (Excalidraw) and the Svelte Mermaid diagram each as a remote. For both I proceeded the same way: first the standalone app, then placed the federation configuration on top. That way I could develop and test Excalidraw or the Mermaid diagram in isolation before the remote was integrated into the shell. The same UI project (react, svelte) continues to run under its own port as a standalone app and can at the same time be loaded by the host as a remote — for the federation loading, however, the built JavaScript chunks plus remoteEntry.json as static assets are sufficient, a running dev server is not necessary (only for the standalone test).
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AppFlowy
Bring projects, wikis, and teams together with AI. AppFlowy is the AI collaborative workspace where you achieve more without losing control of your data. The leading open source Notion alternative.
Project mention: Tell HN: Notion Desktop is monitoring your audio and network | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-07-17 -
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tldr is perfect when man pages are too detailed and you only need the common examples.
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DevDocs.io - API Documentation
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Hi, author of the repo (https://github.com/satwikkansal/wtfpython) here, pleasantly surprised to wake up to this thread about it. The intention of the project is not to put Python in a bad light relative to other languages, the intention was to explore it more deeply through (sometimes contrived) snippets that give non-obvious outputs. I believe for a regular Python programmer, the "Slippery Slopes" section is a must-know. The first section (Strain your brain), does contain some patterns that you may not ever see in real world, the goal there is to just learn about internals. Agreed some of them are very obvious for a well-learned programmer, and some of them aren't even Python specific, it does help a lot of beginner to intermediate programmers. I remember it being given as a supplementary material in one of the CS-based course.
It is curated with something-for-everyone approach, I expect people to learn a thing or two about Python / CS after going through the snippets. I haven't updated it in a while in a major way, but looking at the feedback I'll try to organise them better, and add new snippets (I have a long personal list that I maintain) in a future release!
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Project mention: Ask HN: Best self-hosted wiki solution in 2025? Mediawiki or something else? | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-08-29
I had wanted to use Gitbook for blog/wiki[0] but then discovered that it's not opensource anymore. After not finding anything for a long while finally found something close that will work for me: Docsify[1].
Docsify is git-backed but not a static site generator. Instead it reads the markdown as-is and renders to HTML/DOM (don't know the details) in the browser. I had 2 problems with it, first the sidebar wasn't convenient to edit/update, which I handled by creating a tags: `name` `name` annotation convention. The second was it didn't work for private github repos, which was solved by using Cloudflare Pages to auto-publish changes from git. Effectively now it has a 'build' step like a static-site-generator but it's only to write _sidebar.md from the tagged .md files.
You can see the start of my personal wiki/notes[2] which includes some info about Docsify and Cloudflare Pages & Access (transparently login protect http routes). Note the 'Edit' buttons won't work (as you don't have access to private repo).*
[0] https://blog.keithkim.org
[1] https://docsify.js.org
[2] https://notes.keithkim.org
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• Solutions Engineer — work with customers to understand needs, build solutions on GitBook, and drive adoption.
Learn more about us: https://www.gitbook.com/
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Wiki.js is a modern wiki platform built with Node.js and Vue.js. It uses PostgreSQL for storage, supports multiple editor types (Markdown, WYSIWYG, HTML), and integrates with Git for version-controlled documentation. Current stable version is 2.5. Wiki.js site
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Project mention: Automating Multilingual Content for Odoo 18: Our Headless CMS Pipeline with GPT-5.4 | dev.to | 2026-04-03
Local preview via MkDocs Material before anything goes live
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Two open source dramas in one week? Get the popcorn. From one of the links[0]:
> I do not see him as qualified to keep this project maintainership and if I had the choice, would I remove him.
…where “him” is Tom Christie, aka lovelydinosaur, the original author from what I can tell, and the copyright holder from the license file.
I don’t know what’s going on, but if someone contributing to one of my projects, that I wrote, started a public conversation about how to remove me, my public response might appear as that person disappearing from the project.
Sure, feel free to follow the license and fork the project. Make it clear that it’s a fork, though. It feels misleading to describe it as a continuation of the existing project.
[0] https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/discussions/4088
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docmost
Docmost is an open-source collaborative wiki and documentation software. It is an open-source alternative to Confluence and Notion.
Project mention: Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-19I’m building Docmost, a self-hosted alternative to Notion and Confluence.
It’s open-source, easy to self-host and feature-packed.
GitHub: https://github.com/docmost/docmost.
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docs
A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React. (by suitenumerique)
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architecture-decision-record
Architecture decision record (ADR) examples for software planning, IT leadership, and template documentation
I maintain many open source projects and deal with many kinds of spam, including via email, phone, git pull requests that look real, and much more.
Today Microsoft GitHub sent me a new kind of spam, clearly AI, and what looks like a new major category of problems for open source developers until Microsoft can figure out better security.
See for yourself-- this is the Architecture Decision Record repository that I maintain, that is about software engineering architecture such as software stack choices and technical documentation.
https://github.com/architecture-decision-record/architecture-decision-record/issues/108
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In our JSDoc comments we describe our endpoints to using a set of tags, you can look at the different tags and what they do over on JSDoc's website but here's what we've used and why.
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Gollum
A simple, Git-powered wiki with a local frontend and support for many kinds of markup and content.
Project mention: Show HN: Git-based front-end interface for Hugo | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-20You know who else used git backed pages?
https://github.com/gollum/gollum/wiki
This is pretty simple and dumb :-)
NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
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Index
What are some of the best open-source Documentation projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | the-art-of-command-line | 160,444 |
| 2 | storybook | 90,316 |
| 3 | mermaid | 88,589 |
| 4 | AppFlowy | 72,227 |
| 5 | Docusaurus | 65,192 |
| 6 | tldr | 62,847 |
| 7 | professional-programming | 51,110 |
| 8 | cheat.sh | 41,447 |
| 9 | devdocs | 39,056 |
| 10 | wtfpython | 36,981 |
| 11 | docsify | 31,279 |
| 12 | gitbook | 28,896 |
| 13 | Wiki.js | 28,432 |
| 14 | mkdocs-material | 26,934 |
| 15 | MkDocs | 22,161 |
| 16 | docmost | 20,562 |
| 17 | BookStack | 18,824 |
| 18 | TOAST UI Editor | 17,935 |
| 19 | docs | 16,579 |
| 20 | architecture-decision-record | 15,785 |
| 21 | JSDoc | 15,439 |
| 22 | editor.md | 14,304 |
| 23 | Gollum | 14,277 |
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