Documentation generation, in the spirit of literate programming.
npm install citare-scriptumCitare takes your _documented_ code, and in an admission that people aren't machines,
generates documentation that follows the spirit of literate programming. Take a look at the
self-generated documentation, and see if it appeals to you!
It is very heavily influenced by Jeremy Ashkenas'
docco, and is an attempt to further enhance the idea (thus,
citare can't tout the same quick 'n dirty principles of docco).
Citare will:
* Generate documentation from your source code, by displaying your Marked formatted comments next to the code
fragments that they document.
* Submit your project's documentation to the github pages for your project.
* Generate a searchable table of contents for all documented files and headers within your project.
* Gracefully handle complex hierarchies of source code across multiple folders.
* Read a configuration file so that you don't have to think when you want your documentation built;
you just type citare.
Contains brief function specification highlight (works with github flavored markdown):
``
functionName(Type argument1, Type1/Type2 argument2, Type optionalArgument1?): Type
Citare depends on Node.js. Once you have this installed - and assuming that
your node install came with npm - you can install citare via:
npm install -g citare-scriptum
You may need to prefix the command with sudo, depending on how you installed node.
To generate documentation, just point citare to source files that you want docs for:
citare *.js
Citare will also handle extended globbing syntax if you quote arguments:
citare "lib/*/.coffee" README.md
By default, citare will drop the generated documentation in the doc/ folder of your project, and itREADME.md
will treat as the index. Take a look at your generated docs, and see if everything is
in order!
Once you are pleased with the output, you can push your docs to your github pages branch:
citare --github "lib/*/.coffee" README.md
Citare will automagically create and push the gh-pages branch if it is missing.
There are additional options supported by
citare, if you are interested.
Citare supports a simple JSON configuration format once you know the config values that appeal to you.
Create a .citare.json file in your project root, where each key maps to an option you would pass tocitare
the command. File names and globs are defined as an array with the key glob. For
example, citare's own configuration is:
{
"glob": ["lib//.coffee", "lib//.js", "lib//.jade", "lib//.styl", "**/README.md"],
"except": ["lib/**/jquery.min.js"],
"repository-url": "https://github.com/druide/citare-scriptum"
}
From now on, if you call citare without any arguments, it will use your pre-defined configuration.
) and have the following changes:- comments are processed by marked github flavored markdown
- multiline comments are used for documentation too
- code is highlighted by highlight.js javascript
syntax highlighter
- Default light style, Callout style, Groc darken style
- table of contents includes all the files with all the titles from project
-
{{TOC}} tag to insert auto generated table of contents in your markdown
- [Any Title]` syntax for auto linking to any title in the project (for now citare doesLiterate programming is a programming
methodology coined by Donald Knuth. The primary tenet
is that you write a program so that the structure of both the code and documentation align with
your mental model of its behaviors and processes.
Citare aims to provide a happy medium where you can freely write your source files as structured
documents, while not going out of your way to restructure the code to fit the documentation.
Here are some suggested guidelines to follow when writing your code:
* Try to keep the size of each source file down. It is helpful if each file fulfills a specific
feature of your application or library.
* Rather than commenting individual lines of code, write comments that explain the _behavior_ of a
given method or code block. Take advantage of the fact that comments can span that method.
* Make gratuitous use of lists when explaining processes; step by step explanations are extremely
easy to follow!
* Break each source file into sections via headers. Don't be afraid to split source into even
smaller files if it makes them more readable.
Writing documentation is _hard_; hopefully citare helps to streamline the process for you!