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Introduction.

Laravel IDoc generator (interactive documentation generator) is a seamless and complete plugin for generating API documentation from your Laravel's codebase. It is inspired by the laravel-apidoc-generator, ReDoc and the Open API initiative from Swagger. IDoc has been built with extendability so that it can easily adapt with your use case.

Features

• Extremely easy deployment
• Server Side Rendering ready
• The widest OpenAPI v2.0 features support
  {.inline}
• OpenAPI 3.0 support
• Neat interactive documentation for nested objects
  {.inline}
• Automatic code sample support
  {.inline}
• Responsive three-panel design with menu/scrolling synchronization
• Integrate API Introduction into side menu.
• High-level grouping in side-menu.
• Branding/customizations.

Installation

Note: PHP 7 and Laravel 5.5 or higher are the minimum dependencies.

Laravel

Publish the config file by running:

This will create an idoc.php file in your config folder.

Lumen

• Register the service provider in your bootstrap/app.php:

• Copy the config file from vendor/ovac/idoc/config/idoc.php to your project as config/idoc.php. Then add to your bootstrap/app.php:

Usage

Configuration

Before you can generate your documentation, you'll need to configure a few things in your config/idoc.php.

• path This will be used to register the necessary routes for the package.

• logo You can specify your custom logo to be used on the generated documentation. A relative or absolute url to the logo image.

• title Here, you can specify the title to place on the documentation page.

• description This will place a description on top of the documentation.

• version Documentation version number.

• terms_of_service This is the url to the terms and conditions for use your API.

• contact Here you can configure contact information for support.

• license A short and simple permissive license with conditions only requiring preservation of copyright and license notices

• output This package can automatically generate an Open-API 3.0 specification file for your routes, along with the documentation. This is the file path where the generated documentation will be written to. Default: public/docs

  • hide_download_button This section is where you can configure if you want a download button visible on the documentation.

• router The router to use when processing the route (can be Laravel or Dingo. Defaults to Laravel)

• servers The servers array can be used to add multiple endpoints on the documentation so that the user can switch between endpoints. For example, This could be a test server and the live server.

• tag_groups This array is used to separate groups that you have defined in little sections in the side menu. If you want to use it, make sure you add all groups because the unadded group will not be displayed.

• external_description This option allows you to specify a route name for an external description that will be used in the documentation. If not provided, it will default to the route idoc.info. By default, it is set to idoc.info.

Example usage:

• language-tabs This is where you can set languages used to write request samples. Each item in array is used to generate a request template for a given language. New languages can be added and the existing ones modified after. You can add or edit new languages tabs by publishing the view files and editing them or adding custom view files to:

• security This is where you specify authentication and authorization schemes, by default the HTTP authentication scheme using Bearer is setting but you can modify it, add others or even define it as null according to the requirements of your project. For more information, please visit Swagger Authentication.

• routes This is where you specify what rules documentation should be generated for. You specify routes to be parsed by defining conditions that the routes should meet and rules that should be applied when generating documentation. These conditions and rules are specified in groups, allowing you to apply different rules to different routes.

For instance, suppose your configuration looks like this:

This means documentation will be generated for routes in all domains ('*' is a wildcard meaning 'any character') which match any of the patterns 'api/*' or 'v2-api/*', excluding the 'users.create' route and any routes whose names begin with admin., and including the 'users.index' route and any routes whose names begin with healthcheck.. (The versions key is ignored unless you are using Dingo router). Also, in the generated documentation, these routes will have the header 'Authorization: Bearer: {token}' added to the example requests.

You can also separate routes into groups to apply different rules to them:

With the configuration above, routes on the v1.* domain will have the Token and Version headers applied, while routes on the v2.* domain will have the Authorization and Api-Version headers applied.

Note: the include and exclude items are arrays of route names. THe * wildcard is supported. Note: If you're using DIngo router, the versions parameter is required in each route group. This parameter does not support wildcards. Each version must be listed explicitly,

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

It will generate documentation using your specified configuration.

Documenting your API

This package uses these resources to generate the API documentation:

Grouping endpoints

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

Using @group in a controller doc block creates a Group within the API documentation. All routes handled by that controller will be grouped under this group in the sidebar. The short description after the @group should be unique to allow anchor tags to navigate to this section. A longer description can be included below. Custom formatting and <aside> tags are also supported. (see the Documentarian docs)

Note: using @group is optional. Ungrouped routes will be placed in a "general" group.

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. You can also specify an @group on a single method to override the group defined at the controller level.

Specifying request parameters

To specify a list of valid parameters your API route accepts, use the @bodyParam, @queryParam and @pathParam annotations.

• The @bodyParam annotation takes the name of the parameter, its type, an optional "required" label, and then its description.
• The @queryParam annotation takes the name of the parameter, an optional "required" label, and then its description
• The @pathParam annotation takes the name of the parameter, an optional "required" label, and then its description

They will be included in the generated documentation text and example requests.

Result:

Note: a random value will be used as the value of each parameter in the example requests. If you'd like to specify an example value, you can do so by adding Example: your-example to the end of your description. For instance:

Note: You can also add the @bodyParam annotations to a \Illuminate\Foundation\Http\FormRequest subclass:

Indicating auth status

You can use the @authenticated annotation on a method to indicate if the endpoint is authenticated. A field for authentication token will be made available and marked as required on the interractive documentation.

Providing an example response

You can provide an example response for a route. This will be displayed in the examples section. There are several ways of doing this.

@response

You can provide an example response for a route by using the @response annotation with valid JSON:

Moreover, you can define multiple @response tags as well as the HTTP status code related to a particular response (if no status code set, 200 will be returned):

@transformer, @transformerCollection, and @transformerModel

You can define the transformer that is used for the result of the route using the @transformer tag (or @transformerCollection if the route returns a list). The package will attempt to generate an instance of the model to be transformed using the following steps, stopping at the first successful one:

1. Check if there is a @transformerModel tag to define the model being transformed. If there is none, use the class of the first parameter to the transformer's transform() method.
2. Get an instance of the model from the Eloquent model factory
3. If the parameter is an Eloquent model, load the first from the database.
4. Create an instance using new.

Finally, it will pass in the model to the transformer and display the result of that as the example response.

For example:

For the first route above, this package will generate a set of two users then pass it through the transformer. For the last two, it will generate a single user and then pass it through the transformer.

Note: for transformer support, you need to install the league/fractal package

@responseFile

For large response bodies, you may want to use a dump of an actual response. You can put this response in a file (as a JSON string) within your Laravel storage directory and link to it. For instance, we can put this response in a file named users.get.json in storage/responses:

Then in your controller, link to it by:

The package will parse this response and display in the examples for this route.

Similarly to @response tag, you can provide multiple @responseFile tags along with the HTTP status code of the response:

Generating responses automatically

If you don't specify an example response using any of the above means, this package will attempt to get a

response by making a request to the route (a "response call"). A few things to note about response calls:

• They are done within a database transaction and changes are rolled back afterwards.
• The configuration for response calls is located in the config/idoc.php. They are configured within the ['apply']['response_calls'] section for each route group, allowing you to apply different settings for different sets of routes.
• By default, response calls are only made for GET routes, but you can configure this. Set the methods key to an array of methods or '*' to mean all methods. Leave it as an empty array to turn off response calls for that route group.
• Parameters in URLs (example: /users/{user}, /orders/{id?}) will be replaced with '1' by default. You can configure this, however. Put the parameter names (including curly braces and question marks) as the keys and their replacements as the values in the bindings key.
• You can configure environment variables (this is useful so you can prevent external services like notifications from being triggered). By default the APP_ENV is set to 'documentation'. You can add more variables in the env key.
• By default, the package will generate dummy values for your documented body and query parameters and send in the request. (If you specified example values using @bodyParam or @queryParam, those will be used instead.) You can configure what headers and additional query and parameters should be sent when making the request (the headers, query, and body keys respectively).
• By default all middlewares are enabled, but you can set the without_middleware array to specify the middlewares you prefer to disable, you can even use ['*'] to disable all.

Open-API 3.0 spec file

The generator automatically creates an Open-API 3.0 spec file, which you can import to use within any external api application.

The default base URL added to the spec file 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 spec file. Example environment value:

Documenting Complex Responses with @responseResource

The @responseResource annotation allows you to easily document complex response structures using Laravel API Resources. This feature streamlines the process of generating comprehensive API documentation for nested and complex data structures, including automatic generation of example responses.

Usage

To use the @responseResource annotation, add it to your controller method's PHPDoc block:

You can also specify a status code:

Documenting the Resource Class

In your API Resource class, use the following tags in the class-level DocBlock to provide metadata about the resource:

• @resourceName: Specifies a custom name for the resource in the documentation.
• @resourceDescription: Provides a description of the resource.
• @resourceStatus: Sets a default HTTP status code for the resource.

Example:

Use @responseParam annotations within the toArray method to document individual fields of the resource. You can specify the following for each field:

• Type (e.g., integer, string, array)
• Whether it's required
• Description
• Example value
• Enum values (if applicable)

The @responseResource annotation automatically parses your API Resource class to generate a detailed schema of your response structure, including nested relationships and complex data types. Additionally, it automatically generates an example response based on the provided example values or default values for each field type.

Further modification

The info file in the view folder can be further modified to add introductions and further documentation.

Using the Custom Configuration Generator

The idoc:custom command allows you to generate API documentation using a custom configuration file. This is useful when you need to generate documentation with different settings without modifying the default configuration.

Command Signature

The command signature is:

• config (optional): The name of the custom configuration file (without the .php extension) located in the config directory.

How to Use

1. Create a Custom Configuration File:

   Create a custom configuration file in the config directory. The file should follow the naming convention idoc.{config}.php, where {config} is the name you will use when running the command.

   Example for config/idoc.ecommerce.php:

2. Run the Command:

   Run the command with the name of your custom configuration file (without the .php extension).

   Example:

   If the custom configuration file exists, it will be loaded and merged with the default configuration. The command will then generate the API documentation using the merged configuration.

3. Check the Output:

   The generated documentation will be saved to the path specified in the output configuration option of your custom configuration file. Ensure that the output path is unique for each custom documentation to avoid conflicts. This is relative to the public directory.

   • E-commerce API documentation: /docs/ecommerce, will save the open-api spec file to public/docs/ecommerce/openapi.json and the documentation to public/docs/ecommerce/index.html.
   • User Management API documentation: /docs/user will save the open-api spec file to public/docs/user/openapi.json and the documentation to public/docs/user/index.html.

By using the custom configuration generator, you can easily manage and generate multiple sets of API documentation for different applications within the same Laravel application. This approach allows you to maintain separate configurations and documentation outputs for each API, ensuring clarity and organization.

Managing Multiple API Documentation Sets

The custom configuration generator can also help you manage multiple sets of API documentation for different applications within the same Laravel application. This is particularly useful if you have different API sets for different applications or modules.

Example Scenario

Suppose you have a Laravel application that serves multiple APIs for different applications, such as a user management API, and an e-commerce API. You can create separate configuration files for each API and use the custom configuration generator to generate the documentation accordingly.

1. Create Configuration Files:

   • config/idoc.ecommerce.php
   • config/idoc.user.php

2. Run the Command for Each API:

   This will generate the API documentation for each application using the respective configuration file.

3. Check the Output:

   The generated documentation will be saved to the paths specified in the output configuration options of your custom configuration files. Ensure that each output path is unique to avoid conflicts. This is relative to the public directory.

   • E-commerce API documentation: /docs/ecommerce, will save the open-api spec file to public/docs/ecommerce/openapi.json and the documentation to public/docs/ecommerce/index.html.
   • User Management API documentation: /docs/user will save the open-api spec file to public/docs/user/openapi.json and the documentation to public/docs/user/index.html.

By using the custom configuration generator, you can easily manage and generate multiple sets of API documentation for different applications within the same Laravel application. This approach allows you to maintain separate configurations and documentation outputs for each API, ensuring clarity and organization.

Defining Custom Documentation Routes

To serve the generated documentation for each custom configuration, you need to define routes in your routes/web.php or a similar routes file. This ensures that each set of documentation is accessible via a unique URL.

Example for idoc.ecommerce.php configuration:

bash php artisan idoc:custom ecommerce bash php artisan idoc:custom ecommerce php artisan idoc:custom user

   This will generate the API documentation for each application using the respective configuration file.

3. **Check the Output:**

   The generated documentation will be saved to the paths specified in the `output` configuration options of your custom configuration files. Ensure that each output path is unique to avoid conflicts. This is relative to the public directory.

   - E-commerce API documentation: `/docs/ecommerce`, will save the open-api spec file to `public/docs/ecommerce/openapi.json` and the documentation to `public/docs/ecommerce/index.html`.
   - User Management API documentation: `/docs/user` will save the open-api spec file to `public/docs/user/openapi.json` and the documentation to `public/docs/user/index.html`.

By using the custom configuration generator, you can easily manage and generate multiple sets of API documentation for different applications within the same Laravel application. This approach allows you to maintain separate configurations and documentation outputs for each API, ensuring clarity and organization.

### Defining Custom Documentation Routes

To serve the generated documentation for each custom configuration, you need to define routes in your `routes/web.php` or a similar routes file. This ensures that each set of documentation is accessible via a unique URL.

Example for `idoc.ecommerce.php` configuration:

## Credits

This software uses the following open source packages:

- [Laravel](https://laravel.com/)
- [Redoc](https://github.com/Rebilly/ReDoc)
- [Ramsey UUID](https://github.com/ramsey/uuid)

## You may also like...

- [Laravel Api Documentation Generator](mpociot/laravel-apidoc-generator) - A laravel api documentation generator.

## License

MIT