Swift-DocC Plugin

The Swift-DocC plugin is a Swift Package Manager command plugin that supports building documentation for SwiftPM libraries and executables.

Usage

Please see the plugin's documentation for more detailed usage instructions.

Note: The Swift-DocC plugin is under active-development and is not ready for production use.

We anticipate releasing a 1.0 version of the Swift-DocC plugin aligned with the release of Swift 5.6.

Adding the Swift-DocC Plugin as a Dependency

To use the Swift-DocC plugin with your package, first add it as a dependency:

let package = Package(
    // name, platforms, products, etc.
    dependencies: [
        // other dependencies
        .package(url: "https://github.com/apple/swift-docc-plugin", branch: "main"),
    ],
    targets: [
        // targets
    ]
)

Swift 5.6 is required in order to run the plugin. Development snapshots that include Swift 5.6 can be found on Swift.org.

Converting Documentation

You can then invoke the plugin from the root of your repository like so:

swift package generate-documentation

This will generate documentation for all compatible targets in your package and print the location of the resulting DocC archives.

If you'd like to generate documentation for a specific target and output that to a specific directory, you can do something like the following:

swift package --allow-writing-to-directory ./docs --target MyFramework \
    generate-documentation --output-path ./docs

Notice that the output path must also be passed to SwiftPM via the --allow-writing-to-directory option. Otherwise SwiftPM will throw an error as it's a sandbox violation for a plugin to write to a package directory without explicit permission.

Any flag passed after the generate-documentation plugin invocation is passed along to the docc command-line tool. For example, to take advantage of Swift-DocC's new support for hosting in static environments like GitHub Pages, you could run the following:

swift package --allow-writing-to-directory ./docs --target MyFramework \
    generate-documentation --output-path ./docs \
    --transform-for-static-hosting --hosting-base-path MyFramework

Previewing Documentation

The Swift-DocC plugin also supports previewing documentation with a local web server. However, unlike converting documentation, previewing is limited to a single target a time.

To preview documentation for the MyFramework target, you could run the following:

swift package --disable-sandbox --target MyFramework preview-documentation

Hosting Documentation

For details on how to best build documentation for hosting online and a specific tutorial for publishing to GitHub Pages, please see the plugin's documentation.

Submitting a Feature Request

For feature requests, please feel free to create an issue on Swift JIRA with the New Feature type or start a discussion on the Swift Forums.

Don't hesitate to submit a feature request if you see a way the Swift-DocC plugin can be improved to better meet your needs.

All user-facing features must be discussed in the Swift Forums before being enabled by default.

Contributing to the Swift-DocC Plugin

Please see the contributing guide for more information.

petrpavlik / swift-docc-plugin