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Laravel API Documentation Generator

Automatically generate your API documentation from your existing Laravel routes. A fork of the original laravel-apidoc-generator by Marcel Pociot. Take a look at his example documentation.

php artisan api:gen --routePrefix="settings/api/*"

Installation

Require this package with composer using the following command:

Go to your config/app.php and add the service provider:

This package uses two extra validation rules in Laravel. If you wish to use these, you need to add the following to your AppServiceProvider.php

Using Laravel < 5.4? Use version 1.0! For Laravel 5.4 and up, use 2.0 instead.

Usage

To generate your API documentation, use the api:generate artisan command.

This command will scan your applications routes for the URIs matching api/v1/* and will parse these controller methods and form requests. For example:

Available command options:

Publish rule descriptions for customisation or translation.

By default, this package returns the descriptions in english. You can publish the packages language files, to customise and translate the documentation output.

After the files are published you can customise or translate the descriptions in the language you want by renaming the en folder and editing the files in public/vendor/apidoc/resources/lang.

How does it work?

This package uses these resources to generate the API documentation:

Controller doc block

This package uses the HTTP controller doc blocks to create a table of contents and show descriptions for your API methods.

Using @resource in a doc block prior to each controller is useful as it creates a Group within the API documentation for all methods defined in that controller (rather than listing every method in a single list for all your controllers), but using @resource is not required. The short description after the @resource should be unique to allow anchor tags to navigate to this section. A longer description can be included below.

Above each method within the controller you wish to include in your API documentation you should have a doc block. This should include a unique short description as the first entry. An optional second entry can be added with further information. Both descriptions will appear in the API documentation in a different format as shown below.

Result:

Form request validation rules

To display a list of valid parameters, your API methods accepts, this package uses Laravels Form Requests Validation.

Result:

As well as the standard rules above, descriptions can be extended in the Description column by adding a description rule, like below:

Also, you can set a rule to force a certain faker type to be used in the example requests which are generated. For example:

Note: If you use the description or faker rules, make sure you modify your AppServiceProvider.php as shown above.

API responses

If your API route accepts a GET method, this package tries to call the API route with all middleware disabled to fetch an example API response.

If your API needs an authenticated user, you can use the actAsUserId option to specify a user ID that will be used for making these API calls:

If you don't want to automatically perform API response calls, use the noResponseCalls option.

Note: The example API responses work best with seeded data.

Postman collections

The generator automatically creates a Postman collection file, which you can import to use within your Postman App for even simpler API testing and usage.

If you don't want to create a Postman collection, use the --noPostmanCollection option, when generating the API documentation.

As of as of Laravel 5.3, the default base URL added to the Postman collection will be that found in your Laravel config/app.php file. This will likely be http://localhost. If you wish to change this setting you can directly update the url or link this config value to your environment file to make it more flexible (as shown below):

If you are referring to the environment setting as shown above, then you should ensure that you have updated your .env file to set the APP_URL value as appropriate. Otherwise the default value (http://yourappdefault.app) will be used in your Postman collection. Example environment value:

Modify the generated documentation

If you want to modify the content of your generated documentation, go ahead and edit the generated index.md file. The default location of this file is: public/docs/source/index.md.

After editing the markdown file, use the api:update command to rebuild your documentation as a static HTML file.

As an optional parameter, you can use --location to tell the update command where your documentation can be found.

Skip single routes

If you want to skip a single route from a list of routes that match a given prefix, you can use the @hideFromAPIDocumentation tag on the Controller method you do not want to document.

Further modification

This package uses Documentarian to generate the API documentation. If you want to modify the CSS files of your documentation, or simply want to learn more about what is possible, take a look at the Documentarian guide.

License

The Laravel API Documentation Generator is free software licensed under the MIT license.