API documentation generator

This extension provides an API documentation generator.

For license information check the LICENSE-file.

Installation

[!IMPORTANT]

• The minimum required PHP version is PHP 8.2.

The preferred way to install this extension is through composer.

Either run

The above command may not work on an existing project due to version conflicts that need to be resolved, so it is preferred to add the package manually to the require section of your composer.json:

afterwards run composer update. You may also run composer update yiisoft/yii2-apidoc cebe/markdown if you want to avoid updating unrelated packages.

Usage

This extension creates executable at /vendor/bin. Please do change directory to that directory if you do not want to use full path i.e /vendor/bin/apidoc and use just the executable name as with below examples.

This extension offers two commands:

1)api to generate class API documentation. phpDocumentor is used as a base framework so refer to its guide for the syntax.

The output of help api command (i.e apidoc help api):

2)guide to render nice HTML pages from markdown files such as the yii guide.

The output of help guide command (i.e apidoc help guide):

Simple usage for stand-alone class documentation:

Simple usage for stand-alone guide documentation:

Note that in order to generate a proper index file, the README.md file containing links to guide sections must be present. An example of such file can be found in the yii2 repository.

You can combine them to generate class API and guide documentation in one place:

By default, the bootstrap template will be used. You can choose a different template with the --template=name parameter. Currently, there is only the bootstrap template available.

You may also add the yii\apidoc\commands\ApiController and GuideController to your console application command map and run them inside your application's console app.

Generating docs from multiple sources

The apidoc generator can use multiple directories, so you can generate docs for your application and include the yii framework docs to enable links between your classes and framework classes. This also allows @inheritdoc to work for your classes that extend from the framework. Use the following command to generate combined api docs:

This will read the source files from ./vendor/yiisoft/yii2 directory and . which is the current directory (you may replace this with the location of your code if it is not in the current working directory).

Advanced usage

The following script can be used to generate API documentation and guide in different directories and also multiple guides in different languages (like it is done on yiiframework.com):

Creating a PDF of the guide

Prerequisites:

• pdflatex.
• Pygments.
• GNU make.

Generation:

If all runs without errors the PDF will be guide.pdf in the output dir.

Special Markdown Syntax

We have a special Syntax for linking to a class in the API documentation. See the code style guide for details.

Generating documentation for your own project

To generate API documentation for your own project, use the "project" template and specify the README.md of your repository using the "readmeUrl" parameter:

To also include links to the Yii2 documentation, you can do:

Creating your own templates

TBD

Using the model layer

TBD