DocMyRoutes

This gem provides helpers to annotate Sinatra routes and automatically generate HTML API documentation.

Routes can be annotated with information such as:

• summary (short description)
• notes (extended description)
• content type produced
• returning status codes

In addition, examples can be linked to routes and automatically associated. See the section "Associating examples" for more information.

Installation

DocMyRoutes can be installed via Rubygems or compiling and installing it yourself as:

$ gem build doc_my_routes.gemspec
$ gem install doc_my_routes-VERSION.gem

Usage

Using DocMyRoutes is quite straight-forward and it basically requires two steps:

• configure DocMyRoutes and annotate your application
• triggering the generation of the documentation

Configuring DocMyRoutes and annotating routes

First of all, DocMyRoutes needs to be configured with your project title and description (see the Customisation section for other options).

Simply require 'doc_my_routes' and set the two options:

DocMyRoutes.configure do |config|
  config.title = "My Application"
  config.description = "My Application description"
end

then extend DocMyRoutes::Annotatable in your Sinatra application and start annotating your routes.

Example:

require 'sinatra/base'
require 'doc_my_routes'

DocMyRoutes.configure do |config|
  config.title = "My Application"
  config.description = "My Application description"
end

class MyApp < Sinatra::Base
  # Add support for documenting routes
  extend DocMyRoutes::Annotatable

  summary 'Example route'
  notes 'Simple route that gets an ID and returns a string'
  produces 'text/plain'
  status_codes [200]
  parameter :id, description: 'some ID'
  get '/:id' do |id|
    "Received #{id}"
  end
end

Note that configuring format = :partial_html generates an HTML snippet that can be easily embedded, instead of a complete HTML page.

### Generating documentation

In your config.ru (or in your main .rb file) you can trigger the generation of the documentation invoking DocMyRoutes::Documentation.generate.

Example:

require_relative 'my_app'

# Configure your app here...

...
# If documentation requested (e.g., using an input flag)
DocMyRoutes::Documentation.generate
...

This will generate HTML API documentation to the configured destination_dir. By default the destination directory is doc/api.

### Associating examples

In addition to the helpers described above, DocMyRoutes provides a examples_regex helper that will automatically link call examples to the documentation of that route.

An example represents a request/response interaction related to that route and it's application specific. DocMyRoutes provides a structure to automatically link them to a given route.

Examples must follow a specific format, in order to be correctly used.

1. Must be in YAML format
2. Must have a name key associated, used to filter examples
3. Must have an action key, that defines the action of that route (i.e., GET /myroute)
4. Must have a request section, that might contain the following optional fields:

• params: string defining an example query
• headers: key-values of the headers sent
• body: the body of the request

1. Must have a response section, that might contain the following optional fields:

• status: status of the response
• headers: key-values of the headers received
• body: the body of the response

The field name is used to defined, based on the value of the helper examples_regex, if that example should be associated to that route.

The body can be free format.

A valid example and its association to a route are shown below.

Route annotation:

  examples_regex 'myapp_get_*'
  get '/myapp' do
    'Hello'
  end

Example:

---
action: GET /myapp
request:
  headers:
    MY-APP-ID: example-id
response:
  headers:
    content-type: text/plain;charset=utf-8
  status: 200
  body: 'Hello'
name: my_app_get_hello_example
description: Simple example of a GET that returns Hello

Once the examples are available and the routes are annotated accordingly, DocMyRoutes can be configured to load and parse all the files that match a given regexp.

DocMyRoutes.configure do |config|
  config.examples_path_regexp = 'myapp/examples/*.yml'
end

What kind of applications are supported?

DocMyRoutes can generate documentation for most Sinatra applications and it also automatically detects when an application is mounted on a different path.

The following two examples both would work.

Using map:

require_relative 'my_app'

app = Rack::Builder.app do
  map '/myapp' do
    run MyApp.new
  end
end

...

# If documentation requested (e.g., using an input flag)
DocMyRoutes::Documentation.generate

...

Or using URLMap:

require_relative 'my_app'

app = Rack::Builder.app do
  run Rack::URLMap.new('/myapp' => MyApp.new)
end

...

# If documentation requested (e.g., using an input flag)
DocMyRoutes::Documentation.generate

...

Note: there are occasions where an application may be mounted using url map and be composed of other apps by making use of the 'use' directive in rack. In this case, you need to tell DocMyRoutes to link the two together. By doing this, DocMyRoutes will automatically provide documentation for the child apps mounted wherever the composed app ends up being mounted.

e.g.

class MyChildApp; end
class MyOtherChildApp; end

class MyComposedApp
  DocMyRoutes::Mapping.inherit_mapping(MyChildApp, self)
  DocMyRoutes::Mapping.inherit_mapping(MyOtherChildApp, self)

  use MyChildApp
  use MyOtherChildApp
end

app = Rack::Builder.app do
  run Rack::URLMap.new('/myapp' => MyComposedApp.new)
end

Customisation

Some aspects of DocMyRoutes can be customised to provide a different user experience.

The next few sections describe the available settings; simply have code like the following snippet to change those settings.

require 'doc_my_routes'

DocMyRoutes.configure do |config|
  config.SETTING = MY_VALUE
end

Customise title and description

The settings title and description control the first section of the documentation and should always be configured.

Destination directory

The setting destination_dir defines where to store the generated documentation.

Customise format

The output format may be customised by setting the format setting. At present :html and :partial_html are supported (default :html). :html produces a full html page with a head and body section. :partial_html produces the documentation that maybe embedded in another webpage.

Customise output

A custom CSS file can be provided to change the look and feel of the documentation.

The setting css_file_path controls which file is going to be loaded and used.

The simplified structure with custom classes of the current template is shown in the following snippet and can be used a guideline of what can be easily customised.

section.documentation
  header
    info.title
    info.description

  section.resources
    article.resource (repeated for every resource)
      summary.resource
      article.operation {.get, .put, .post, .delete} (for every operation)
        summary.operation
        div.content {.get, .put, .post, .delete}
          ... actual content ...
          article.example {.get, .put, .post, .delete}
            summary.example {.get, .put, .post, .delete}
            div.example_content {.get, .put, .post, .delete}
              div.request
                div.code {.get, .put, .post, .delete}
                pre.request-code.query
                pre.request-code.headers
                pre.request-code.body
              div.response
                div.code {.get, .put, .post, .delete}
                pre.request-code.headers
                pre.request-code.body

Configuring a custom logger

A custom logger can be provided using:

require 'doc_my_routes'
DocMyRoutes.logger = MY_CUSTOM_LOGGER

class MyApp < Sinatra::Base
  extend DocMyRoutes::Annotatable

...

If a custom logger is not configured, a standard one that writes to STDOUT is provided by default.

Known issues

• Multiple Rack applications inheriting from the same parent application are not supported at the moment. (see spec/system/childapps_spec.rb for an example)
• Firefox and IE do not support the HTML5 details tag and hence the route section are not collapsible

Contributing & License

Please refer to CONTRIBUTING and LICENSE for more information.