I am developing a REST API in nodejs + Express and I have been simultaneously documenting my API in the README file and I was wondering if it is possible to automate it. e.g. given:
app.get('/path/to', dosomething);
app.post('/path/to/:somethingelse', scream);
I want it to auto generate this
GET: /path/to dosomething
POST: /path/to/:somethingelse scream
You can get close.
Have a look in the 'res' object. You will see that it has a reference to your app object. So, res.app._router.map contains a set of arrays for the http methods (get, post, etc). Say in the GET array, there is a path and a callback property. path will give you the route url, and callback is an array of route handlers. From here you can get the function names.
So...
Make a new route that is used purely for outputting your doco to a file. In that route handler, parse though res.app._router.map.GET, res.app._router.map.POST etc.
Not ideal, but workable.
I was also looking for a module to do this but I couldn't find one that did what I needed. So I recently created this module to auto-generate API docs for Express and Mongoose based APIs. It saves me a lot of time as API developer and the front-end developers are also happy with this.
I think scraping routes for generating API documentation is a bad idea. Autogenerated documentation usually goes the same way as JavaDoc: unused, forgotten and ultimately abandoned. Resulting documentation is usually just too basic and lacking a human dimension.
Disclaimer: I run a startup for generating REST API documentation, which as it happens is also built on node.js+express. Normally I make a point of not doing commercial plugs, but I think this is too much spot on and topical. We do make maintaining the API documentation as simple as possible: http://apiary.io/ (ping me for invite if you're interested)
This is javascript, you can easily patch the original methods to also generate the docs.
Here is a sample code in coffeescript:
express = require 'express'
methods = require 'express/node_modules/methods' # array of all HTTP methods
app = express()
methods.forEach (method) ->
orig = app[method]
app[method] = (path, handler) ->
console.log "patched method ", method, " ", path
# generate docs here
orig.apply(this, arguments)
You can also get the code of the handler function using handler.toString(). Add some Regex-Fu and you can extract more notes from a function written like this:
app.get "/foo", (req, res) ->
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit"
more code here