Civic Auth comes with multiple SSO options, optional embedded wallets, and user management — all implemented with just a few lines of code. Start building today. Learn more →
Top 23 Documentation Open-Source Projects
-
1️⃣7️⃣ The Art of Command Line 🖥️ 📌 https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line Master the Linux command line with this detailed guide.
-
SurveyJS
JavaScript Form Builder with No-Code UI & Built-In JSON Schema Editor. Add the SurveyJS white-label form builder to your JavaScript app (React/Angular/Vue3). Build complex JSON forms without coding. Fully customizable, works with any backend, perfect for data-heavy apps. Learn more.
-
storybook
Storybook is the industry standard workshop for building, documenting, and testing UI components in isolation
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to build a monorepo using Lerna. We’ll be building a Next.js application which will import components from a separate package. We’ll also be using Storybook to showcase those components.
-
mermaid
Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text in a similar manner as markdown
Project mention: Show HN: Mermaid Chart VS Code Plugin: Mermaid.js Diagrams in Visual Studio Code | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-02It's worth pointing out that mermaidchart.com is NOT the official Mermaid project (https://mermaid.js.org/).
They're a for-profit company using the Mermaid name.
This creates a lot of confusion whenever the name comes up, which I suspect is deliberate.
-
-
Project mention: AI Coding and the Peanut Butter and Jelly Problem | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-12
Before LLMs there existed quite a few tools to try to help with understanding CLI options; off the top of my head there are https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr and explainshell.com
LLMs are both more general and more useful than those tools. They're more flexible and composable, and can replace those tools with a small wrapper script. Part of the reason why the LLMs can do that though is because it has those other tools as datasets to train off of.
-
Professional Programming by Charles-Axel Dein
-
-
Civic Auth
Auth in Less Than 5 Minutes. Civic Auth comes with multiple SSO options, optional embedded wallets, and user management — all implemented with just a few lines of code. Start building today.
-
ID: i26 Tags: Programming, API, Documentation Description: Fast, offline, and free documentation browser for developers. GitHub Link | Website Link
-
Project mention: Ask HN: Is there any programming language that doesn't have WTFs? | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-21
After reading this page:
https://github.com/satwikkansal/wtfpython?tab=readme-ov-file#-needles-in-a-haystack-
I wonder if there's any language that thought about all edge cases and avoided exceptions and such gotchas at the design level.
JS is notorious for such WTFs but even Python—which I've used for over a decade now—has surprised me countless times.
Is Haskell also like that? How about Lisps (CL, Racket, Clojure, Scheme, etc.)?
-
I built a fast, responsive, and lightweight static documentation site powered by Docsify, hosted on AWS S3 with a CloudFront CDN for global distribution. The entire infrastructure is managed using Pulumi YAML, allowing me to declaratively define and deploy resources without writing any imperative code.
-
Project mention: How to Migrate Technical Documentation: Tools, Checklist, and Tips | dev.to | 2025-05-13
GitBook is a documentation platform that provides a sleek, collaborative interface for technical teams and product documentation. It’s known for its clean UI, WYSIWYG editing, and support for markdown. GitBook supports team collaboration, access control, and integrates with tools like GitHub and Slack. It’s great for teams looking for a balance between ease of use and professionalism.
-
Project mention: Show HN: We built a FOSS documentation CMS with a pretty GUI | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-05
-
MkDocs-Material
-
Project mention: How to Migrate Technical Documentation: Tools, Checklist, and Tips | dev.to | 2025-05-13
MkDocs is a static site generator designed specifically for project documentation and written in Python. It’s easy to set up, uses markdown for content, and features a number of themes, including the popular Material for MkDocs. MkDocs integrates well with Python-based workflows and CI/CD tools. It’s a great choice for Python developers and teams looking for simplicity and readability.
-
Project mention: Show HN: Unforget, the note-taking app I always wanted: offline first, encrypted | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-06-11
What problems did you encounter with something like https://ui.toast.com/tui-editor? Which is much more featureful than simplemde.
-
Additionally at some point people behind this product decided to change the licensing model, and allow the use of community editions for up to 5 nodes. It wasn't my case, but that pushed me to use something more independent. So I started using dockge, then added another service for docker logs, version monitor, and keeps adding applications that are fun to use, for example homebox or bookstack. It was fun until I released the cost of energy and maintenance effort need to keep it running, at my home. Every internet issue, or power issue takes my setup down. Maybe it was not happening very often, but when I wasn’t home, and the hardware was down, there was no chance to fix it remotely. And I started relaying on that service. That is why I simply decided to migrate to hetzner, and podman at the same time, and use remote NFS. However, let's start from the beginning.
-
One of the best tools available in Web Component development is the Custom Elements Manifest. It's a JSON representation of all your available components, covering all the attributes, methods, slots and events they support, powered by your JSDoc comments and TypeScript types. You can customize the manifest generation through plugins to support custom JSDoc comments, allowing you to power more pieces of your documentation through code comments; for example, you could set up a comment format to indicate if your component is experimental or stable or provide a way to add a link to your Figma files.
-
docmost
Docmost is an open-source collaborative wiki and documentation software. It is an open-source alternative to Confluence and Notion.
Project mention: File structure in Docmost, an open-source alternative to Confluence and Notion | dev.to | 2025-04-24I found this in App.tsx L54 — L68.
-
-
Gollum
A simple, Git-powered wiki with a local frontend and support for many kinds of markup and content.
Depends on your target user. If you want something really simple for developers, https://github.com/gollum/gollum is pretty neat (is what powers the Wiki system on GitHub), while if you want something simple for people who aren't developers, something like Mediawiki would fit better. Although Mediawiki requires a database, you can use SQLite (which is basically a file on disk as a DB) for it.
Dokuwiki is also a neat old-school alternative that basically treats files on disk as articles/pages, so no (other) DB needed.
-
architecture_decision_record
Architecture decision record (ADR) examples for software planning, IT leadership, and template documentation
Project mention: 50 years of the Mythical Man Month: insights that still shape the software industry | dev.to | 2025-02-12And with that Brooks describes something quite similar to what we now know as Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
-
cheat
cheat allows you to create and view interactive cheatsheets on the command-line. It was designed to help remind *nix system administrators of options for commands that they use frequently, but not frequently enough to remember.
-
Project mention: Man pages are great, man readers are the problem | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-09
-
InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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).
Documentation discussion
Documentation related posts
-
Organização de Projetos no Github
-
How to Migrate Technical Documentation: Tools, Checklist, and Tips
-
A Rust Documentation Ecosystem Review
-
Gland: Beyond Protocol-Agnostic
-
Doc Detective, test framework to validate product doc accuracy
-
How to use curl
-
Show HN: OasRails – AutoGenerate Interactive API Docs in Rails with Yard and OAS
-
A note from our sponsor - Civic Auth
www.civic.com | 14 May 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source Documentation projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | the-art-of-command-line | 155,912 |
| 2 | storybook | 86,563 |
| 3 | mermaid | 79,145 |
| 4 | Docusaurus | 59,763 |
| 5 | tldr | 55,154 |
| 6 | professional-programming | 47,598 |
| 7 | cheat.sh | 39,353 |
| 8 | devdocs | 36,245 |
| 9 | wtfpython | 36,219 |
| 10 | docsify | 29,248 |
| 11 | gitbook | 27,881 |
| 12 | Wiki.js | 26,242 |
| 13 | mkdocs-material | 23,226 |
| 14 | MkDocs | 20,396 |
| 15 | TOAST UI Editor | 17,476 |
| 16 | BookStack | 16,586 |
| 17 | JSDoc | 15,218 |
| 18 | docmost | 15,192 |
| 19 | editor.md | 14,097 |
| 20 | Gollum | 13,992 |
| 21 | architecture_decision_record | 13,291 |
| 22 | cheat | 12,766 |
| 23 | zeal | 12,125 |
Sponsored
JavaScript Form Builder with No-Code UI & Built-In JSON Schema Editor
Add the SurveyJS white-label form builder to your JavaScript app (React/Angular/Vue3). Build complex JSON forms without coding. Fully customizable, works with any backend, perfect for data-heavy apps. Learn more.
surveyjs.io