adamburmister / docchi

Documentation generating tool for JavaScript.

Docchi

Docchi parses comments in JavaScript code and outputs the structure and context of the comments in any particular format, JSDoc is the default. It traverses the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) to determine the context of a comment.

There is no reason for Docchi to exist (besides working in ES6). Basically it's glue code between the excellent Acorn parser, and the documentation parser Doctrine. The initial motivation is to support ES6, and a modular approach to comment formatting. There's already JSDoc and dox, but I found these lacking for my needs.

Get it from npm:

$ npm install -g docchi

Note: you may need to run the above command as a superuser (using sudo).

Usage

Docchi operates over stdio. Running Docchi on its own source code, and outputting the result to docs.json:

$ docchi < lib/index.js > docs.json

Or you could use it programmatically, as part of a Node-based build script:

import fs from 'fs'
import docchi from 'docchi'

// Parse a string or a buffer.
let doc = docchi.parse(fs.readFileSync('example.js'))

// An array of parsed comments matched with their contexts.
let output = doc.output()

The output method accepts 2 arguments, a function that accepts a comment and returns anything, and an options object to pass to the custom function or the built-in parser, Doctrine.

Example

This code documentation:

/**
 * This is a **Foo** class.
 */
class Foo {
    /**
     * This is the constructor.
     *
     * @param {Object} options
     */
    constructor (options) { ... }
}

Gets outputted as:

[{ comment: { description: '<p>This is a <strong>Foo</strong> class.</p>', tags: [] },
   context: { location: { start: [Object], end: [Object] },
              name: 'Foo', type: 'class' }
 },
 { comment: { description: '<p>This is the constructor.</p>', tags: [Object] },
   context: { location: { start: [Object], end: [Object] },
              type: 'constructor', target: 'Foo' }
}]

Descriptions are rendered into HTML using CommonMark. Use { render: false } in the options for output to turn it off.

The default JSDoc parser will only consider block comments that start with /**.

Contributing

There are a lot of AST nodes that it does not match yet. Pull requests welcome.

License

Docchi is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.